Not clear. It's really a question of crowd behavior and culture, not technology.

Despite all the hype about 'disruption', NFC is a small convenience, it doesn't enable anything new. So now your fone is your credit card. Instead of swiping my card i smack something with my fone.

There is a long list of great technologies which offer incremental improvements in convenience, which just get ignored. Roomba - it vacuums for you. Works great! Do you have one? Do you know anyone that does ?

Truth is, vacuuming's not that hard and it's kind of creepy having an autonomous hockey puck to trip over.

Digital alternatives to business cards have existed for years now. But yanno, cards aren't that cumbersome. And we like the manual (literally) control of handing an object to someone.

Read that last line again.

Thought experiment : Take your wallet, and throw it across the room. Hold just your fone.

Do you feel empowered, or lost?

Then there is the question of installing all the POS counterparts. It's a tough sell to go up to Dunkin Donuts and convince them to invest millions in deploying technology that won't gain them a *single customer*, arguably.

Two steps :

First, write a computer program that prints itself out without looking up its source code in memory or on disk. Any language. Hint - you are going to have to use clever string substitution, and use numerical ascii code.

This is tricky, but when you solve it yourself you will have replicated Godel's masterstroke, the self-referential nub of Godel's G.

Then. as another poster suggested, go by way of the Halting Problem. Show that no automated test can exist which tells you if a computer program ever terminates.

Suppose such a test existed, call it Halt(P) where P is some source code.

Write a new program called Spite :

Spite(P) :
if Halt(this-programs-source-code) then hang,
else quit.

This program by design does the opposite of what Halt( ) says it does, hence Halt doesn't work in this case. 'this-programs-source-code' is easy to calculate once you've mastered the self-printing trick.

Finally, convince yourself that the statement "this program will terminate" can be translated directly into number theory.

No.

This has been answered lots of times, my take is this -

They make cool stuff fearlessly. Yea, I know, duh. What I mean is, they do things that typical companies would regard as so reckless as to be unthinkable :

No market research or focus groups. They don't study the market, calculate the price point, and project profit. They don't pass their product around focus groups. It if feels cool to them, they build it and launch it. They aren't afraid to fail (and they have.)

No concern for features : They'll throw out any feature which feel clunky- a disk drive, multi tasking, more mouse buttons. Because minimalism is cool.

Total control of the end-product : They control the manufacturing and every aspect of the end-product. It costs more that way, but crashes are not cool. Device drivers are not cool.

No concern for market share : They won't drop their price, or add features to chase after the non-apple users, or license their OS to alien platforms.

By refusing to get drawn into these tactical skirmishes to gain a few more users, they end up winning the war. In short, and ironically enough, they win the market by ignoring it.

Or, to quote Henry Ford, "If i had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse.'"

I think so. The Nobel Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus who started a micro-lending program to lift people out of poverty. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/business/14nobelcnd.html

No. Japan was already trying to surrender, asking only that no harm come to the emperor.

On July 12 a wire was sent from Japan to the Soviet Union saying, "His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all the belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated."

The Japanese deliberately used a cypher which was known to have been cracked by the British. So they also became aware of this surrender effort :

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/31.pdf

I've just started using Linode, and have found it easy to get started with. The total control is nice - I can configure the box to exactly match my development machine. Using ssh -X, I code and debug directly on the thing.

Low cost of entry, but it's got some really big sites on it so i'm confident i won't have to move if my thingie's a hit.

It evolved a rather nervous monkey who could conceive this very question, express it in a persistent, visual form, and broadcast it to the rest of his species using light and electricity.

Can only guess at another person's inner motivations, but it seems to me :

Google feels left out of the social party since Bing has partnered with Facebook (smart investment, MS.) Facebook recently surpassed Google for most daily hits on the web.

People are becoming less interested in searching the static web, and more interested in fresh information curated by their social net.

So there's a big (perceived) loss of traffic there. Also, Google would very much like to index content based on social relevance (How many Likes? Shares? How many in your social net?)

I don't know if FB allows the google bots to spider these statistics, but even if FB does - it could stop at any time. This is perhaps the motivation behind the recent +1 initiative.

As for the bonus tie-in, and looking at FB's history : part of FB's success story was that it was launched and quickly adopted by a majority of Harvard students.
Harvard students tend to be well connected, intelligent ... just interesting people.
It made FB an interesting place right away.

Google's 20,000 or so employees are similarly interesting folk. L Page may be trying to give them a little nudge to become active themselves in Google's social efforts. I think it's the wrong kind of incentive, personally.

Well someone's got to say it. The Zune 1.0. Brown. (I have one!)

good explanation here, http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm .

Long story short, a 32-bit OS has a total address space of 4GB; it needs part of that address space to communicate with various devices.

The invasion of Normandy was successful, in part, because Alan Turing and company had cracked the Enigma cypher, enabling the Allies to know where the Nazis expected them to land, and to choose a different location.

According to the Imperial War Museum's exhibit The Secret War, Churchill stated to King George VI, "It was thanks to Ultra [the Enigma-cracking project] that we won the war." A bit of Churchillian hyperbole certainly; but a startling expression of the importance of this tiny group of people.

<disclaimer> I used to be an occasional contributor, so a lot of what i'm about to say may be 'subject to verification' </disclaimer>

There emerged a core group of about 500 people who work on Wikipedia 60+ hours a week. Wikipedia is highly gameable - if there's some debate going on, all you have to do is give 2 friends a nudge, who come vote down your opponent.

This group came to assert ownership over the whole project. Now, the wikipedia 'pillars' (principles on which it operates) aren't hard to grasp, so it's not hard for a newbie to come up to speed and start improving content.

But the core group demanded newbies - with low edit counts - supplicate themselves. If your edit count was low, you were wrong - always. Debate them based on the 'pillars' and they would just badger you in large numbers.

I suspect a group of people who have nothing better to do full time than contribute anonymously to wikipedia weren't exactly, um, otherwise accomplished.
Being able to write directly into the top google rank for certain terms perhaps went to their heads. They turned hostile to newcomers.

One particular encounter sticks in my head (yes, it was the fall of '07.) Newbie comes by, and adds a line to an article, quoting a respected, peer-reviewed researcher "People with X often do Y."

Some core-folk just seemed to resent the newbie's presence, and said, "We cannot add that until it is demonstrated with people with X do Y more than 50% of the time."

The newbie, stunned to be explaining the definition of 'often', after 6 pages of debate, said something i found especially poignant, "I can see that you guys have all the volunteers you want already." Logged off and never came back again.

Essentially, a "dictatorship of seniority" emerged and turned xenophobic.

Quora avoids this dynamic by

Enforcing the use of real names.

Allowing conflicting answers to coexist, eliminating the need for debate. The readers can vote as they please.

The most active users do have a 'positive-feed-loop' advantage. They have more followers,higher People Rank, so more readers see and upvote their stuff. But an active user can't come *erase* your stuff, obliterating your work and wasting your time.

The ethic of Be Nice, Be Respectful has taken root deep in Quora's culture. Sure, there are disagreements. They are almost always civil and rarely drag on (just go write a competing answer!)

New people generally have a good experience, which is the key to long-term growth and relevance. Subject matter expects get voted into the stratosphere.

Wikipedia did a great job at collecting factual content. Quora did a better job at collecting the authors of new content.

It created a community, not just a compendium.

This is the reason I think Quora will continue to grow and engage people.

I am a big fan of all things digital and a rather compulsive texter. But this question made me realize that - aside from my brother in another state - virtually everyone i communicate with - I also see in person at least 3 times a week. (Except for quora!)

i use digital communication to coordinate real-life meeting up. A net/cellular blackout wouldn't affect me much.

I wonder if I'm just older and grew up without all this stuff ... if my (unintended) mode of digital communication is somehow healthier.

For a web server : if you expect heavy database load, you'll want lots of RAM (>>3 GB) for memcached. 64-bit can handle that. Only time ive found it makes a big difference.

a) myspace didnt encourage/require users to give their real names
So you couldnt find anyone or be found. This became more important as the age of people skewered higher, and ppl wanted to reconnect with far-flung freinds from the past.

b) myspace let users pollute the UI :
Originally a bug, myspace let users upload HTML to their page and bling it out.
Popular at first so they left the bug in. The result was a visual mess.

c) obstrusive advertising : Huge banner ads and popups further wrecked the experience.

d) Facebook made none of these errors and stole the social fair and square. Some have given the meta-reason that MySpace sold out to suits who didn't use the product themselves, while Facebook remained in the control of younger enthusiasts who understood the culture they were aiming for.

Perhaps not worry about it too much. People are getting used to seeing the occasional ranting fool. In fact, when I see *no* ranting fool, i start wondering if astro-turfing is taking place.

Then again, maybe No.

This idea clings to the notion of absolute time, which relativity does away with.
That every point in the universe is marching in lockstep along the same timeline.
Relativity says it's not.

When we look at alpha centauri, we are seeing it as it is now, according to our frame of reference. The timeline of all the bodies in the universe is different for every frame of reference (position and velocity).

Suppose a spaceship were hovering at the midpoint between our sun and alpha centauri, and the ship sees both stars explode at once.

According to alpha-centauri time, we blew up 4 years later. According to earth-time, it was alpha centauri that blew up 4 years later. According to the spaceship, the events were simultaneous. All 3 are right.

Relativity says this is not an optical illusion; that the notion of "when" depends on "from where?"

It would be cool if myspace could tightly integrate with something like pandora, so others could listen in on my playlist while i do, make live comments, recommend songs, merge stations with mine.

Social music.

To me, he was not great so much for what he did, but rather what he undid. The great bulldozer of post-modernism.

Where Picasso threw away perspective, Pollack threw away the whole notion of 'image' - his paintings weren't of anything - they were of themselves. No figure, no ground, no elements - just paint and canvas.

He wasn't alone of course, and other examples of this predate him (as any parent will attest) - but more than any other contemporary he opened the doors to abstract expressionism and diverted the world's gaze from Paris to New York.

Why can't we have a keychain which bleeps its precise location to a website we can check? *hastens to patent office ....

Get your question off my damn lawn !!! ;)

I talk to my dog (corgi mix) all the time, but I find myself modifying my language according to his reactions, so a modified english has emerged.

For instance, the first meal I served him I called "breakfast". He suddenly formed an association with that word, so that any meal is now called "breakfast" (I call dinner "second breakfast.")

Similarly, his first toy was a big rubber 'gumby'. Soon any toy became a 'gumby''. The phrase "gimme-that-gumby" is an invitation to play tug-of-war or fetch.

When playing fetch, I throw him a ball and when he catches it, I hold my arms out at my sides to form a human cross, both to become a goalpost for him to return to and to acknowledge his success in a way visible from afar.

At the dog park, a woman said to me "I notice two things: one - you talk to your dog the whole time you are here and two - you've got the smartest dog."

I think two big reasons :

A technology can become possible - but that doesn't make it economically viable.
There's got to be a couple of lucky accidents for the latter. We're getting into wars just to supply the energy to push us around on 4 wheeled carts. Jetpacks just arent in the cards yet, it seems.

Secondly, futurists usually just extrapolate the present. A jetpack is an extrapolation of the bicycle, the car, the airplane.

What really happens is more interesting - we change direction. We've got something way cooler than jetpacks :

The web and google : all the world's knowledge, past and emergent (getting there, anyway.)
The smart phone : I can talk to anyone, anywhere. I can access the world's knowledge repository wherever I am. I am never lost (GPS). All the music I like is in my pocket.

Rather than just refining existing technology, we went in a new direction.

I'm heading out now, to a cafe. No jetpack, but i've got a backpack. Into which i'll put my portable computer. If anyone responds to this message, i'll see it because the cafe is connected to the information grid. When I get there, I'm going to work on a facebook app. If I do a good enough job and I'm very lucky, it'll spread virally thru the social grid and thousands of people will use it.

We live in the coolest time, ever.

The fuel rods are encased in zirconium. When they got hot, they steal the oxygen atom from water and release hydrogen.

Is it just this simple - why use a seawall at all? Could the Fukushima accident have been prevented by simply locating the backup generators uphill?

I would suggest Not Trying To Protect Your Idea. Just skip #1. NDA's are passé, and investors won't sign them.

Your patent application will take years to process. And even longer to defend (and you'll probably lose, there's almost certainly some prior art somewhere that's close to your idea.)

Also - the other elements to a successful launch - execution, money, luck - are unstealable.

Friendster has basic patents on social networking - fat lot of good it did them.

If it makes you feel better, it's cheap and easy to file a provisional patent - it only cost $200 and you don't need a lawyer. Just write a white paper and make sure the 'claims' - the unique features of your product - are in there. Make sure to do this before you disclose details to anyone; any sort of disclosure prior to filing can later be used to invalidate your entire patent by anyone at all - not just the party you disclosed to. Instructions for provisional are here: http://www.uspto.gov/

So sure, spend a few hours and 200 bucks and get it out of the way. Or just forget about it.

The best way to protect your idea is to launch it fast and keep it best.

This question goes back 2500 years to Plato, and is still a subject of debate :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Platonism

Wasn't their idea. Friendster, Myspace, match.com. Social networking was old news. The "dating site" they envisioned wouldn't have taken off. Garish, too forward. They did launch ConnectU and could have introduced it to, say, Stanford a few months later. But it sucked.

The Crimson was already suggesting such a social networking site after the facemash debacle. I'm pretty sure Exeter already had one.

There was a sea change in social norms - suddenly people were OK with sharing their real identities online. This came as a surprise to even the FB founders.

What was supposed to be a closed, university-wide social net was stampeded by the world.

Zuck was properly positioned because he shut up and started coding. A thousand white-board wannabees were left in the dust. End of story.

Friend/Unfriend (verb)
Tag.
Viral (in the social sense.)
Flash mob.
Blog.
Crowdsource.
Meme.
Check in.
Facebook suicide (to deactivate one's account.)

the principle of "Fair Use", http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html, in the United States, allows you to mention and even take literal excerpts without permission of the copyright holder, for the purpose of commentary and criticism or any other 'transformative act'. (If I am making a parody, the law allows me to steal like crazy.)

The key is : you're making something different (a movie, not a website) and you're only stealing enough to reasonably achieve your goal.

For example, "Fair Use" allows me to sample any song I want for about 30 seconds, and put it on my web page entitled "my favorite songs."

In the case of the Social Network movie, "Fair Use" allows the mention of facebook, and in the trailer - you'll notice they even show the (copyrighted) facebook page in action.

Relativity does allow for mass to be created at speeds greater than the speed of light (tachyons). These move backward in time. These pose a challenge primarily in the field of linguistics : http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/08/douglas-adams-on-time-travel.html

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

In a philosophical attempt to defend selfishness in capitalism, Rand tries to consume all the typewriter ink in New York City with such pseudo-profundities as "A is A" and "Existence exists."

Rand's writing is heavily influenced by her childhood in the Soviet Union from which she emmigrated in 1926 and which refused to take her back.

This caused the The Cold War.

Long story short - yes. My understanding is - the people you interact with most get bumped. "Interaction" comes in many forms - wall posts, co-tags in photos, etc, probably with differering weights. Also, apps like Farmville can buy their way into your news feed. </rumor and conjecture>

I think Ubuntu rocks - the option to install non-open source drivers at install-time was a big step forward.

It sounds awfully specific, but I think the lack of a Silverlight port is the major drawback - people really like streaming netflix.

This is usually the deal-breaker for people I talk to. And the only thing keeping my windows partition alive.

Hell yes !

Do not be discouraged just because there are 17 (and 12-) year old coders who kick ass.

This is a non linear field - it reboots and reinvents itself every 5 years or so. That's what's great about it.

I've been at it for 30 years now. When I started, there was BASIC, but it was too slow for games (what we all wanted), so you had to write assembly code. And write your own tools (assembler) to do it.

Then I went to work for the military, and there was FORTRAN on the mainframes. So i had to learn that. But something new was happening, all these Sun workstations, networked together, had more total processing power than the mainframes. You programmed them in C.

I was early 20's then, had to throw out all i knew about BASIC and FORTRAN and learn C. X-Windows. The older generation, who derided our graphical workstations as "cartoon machines" (actual quote) got left in the dust.

Objects! Then came object oriented programming Screw C, it's all about C++ now. Which ripped out half of C and plopped on 10 times as much "++"" to support objects.

Then the Soviets called the cold war quits, so I moved to Cambridge and got to learn from some ubersmart MIT and Harvard people. Screw objects, functional programming was where it's at if you want to do AI. Lisp! Scheme!

I joked to a coworker, "in programming, there is nothing so crippling as experience".

Then the frigging internet happened. There's a scripting language on the server, another one in the database, another one in the browser.

A few (and not many) underlying ideas do carry forward : data structures, loops, etc. But 95% of the actual stuff you have to learn, you have to relearn every time a wave comes.

What remains is a curious and playful approach - just jump right in, don't worry about stuff like 'am i smart enough' - just go build something, maybe an android App or a Website.

The android App would be Java, for a web app I'd suggest Python on the server and some Javascript on the client.

Definitely get an intro to programming book (language doesn't matter, Java or Python is cool so you get a handle on basic programming concepts.)

If you finish the book, you're doing it wrong.

Somebody check me on this, but ubuntu gives you LAMP in one command : http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/linux-distributions/linux-distributions4-ubuntu/1239-install-lamp-with-1-command-in-ubuntu-1010-maverick-meerkat

Is is this easy on OSX ?

I don't think so. (Beacon.) There is something uncool about sharing buying habits.

People get it. They understand this converts their social communication into advertising. They don't like that. Any more than most people want to walk around in real life huckstering anything to their friends. You can't even pay them to do it.

As Michael Imbleau points out, people do occasionally make recommendations for stuff like restaurants. They know they are doing the restaurant a favor.

It's not a favor they are willing to grant every day - nor do they like being asked to grant it.

Madison avenue desperately wants in to the "social networking space" and yes - there have been some successful viral compaigns. But the larger message to advertisers is : "The social network is Invite Only. You're not invited."

Not technically graph-theory, but nearby - from the Putnam Exam, 1989 (i think) :

In the RxR plane, every point one of three possible colors. The coloring scheme is unknown. Are there necessarily two points, one inch apart, the same color?

(Msg me for the answer.)

Don't know if this qualifies as 'iconic', but it is painfully emblematic of america's long struggle to realize the "true meaning of its creed." Pulitzer Prize, 1976.

The fall of berlin - the soviet flag is raised over the reichstag. The bloodiest battle in human history which killed 10.6 million soviets and 4.3 million germans
comes to an end.

Complementary pairing : Watson and Crick with the first model of DNA.

Friendster.

Not in terms of market cap, but in squandered opportunity.

They nailed social networking first. With real names. The essential ingredients of Facebook.

Reasons for failure: executive control of the site passed out of technical hands.
The company was taken over by deal-makers, not site-builders.

I tried to log in back in 2003, I think. The server timed out at 40 seconds. The problem wasn't bandwidth - it was a single, expendable feature: a user could crawl deeply into an exponentially expanding tree of friends-of-friends-of-friends... Too many queries.

The people running the company could only yell "make it work." They lacked the technical acumen to make the call: turn that feature off.

As Friendster sputtered, Myspace came along and stole the social net.

Friendster had the right idea, at the right time, the right connections and funding. And they blew it. Merry christmas, zuck :)

An excellent summary of Friendster's collapse is given here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html

Don't push - pull. I mean :

The Push philosophy: Your users/clients are something to be figured out.
Through market research, focus groups - you - in your brilliance - are going to find out what they want before they do, and them herd them towards a new position which you triangulated. It's not where you want to be, but that's OK. You aren't one of the herd. You're a triangulator - a master of the universe.
You're going to cash out, big time.

The Pull philosophy : Build something because you want it yourself. There's a place you want to be. It's so compelling you can't stop yourself -
you need to get there fast. Once there, you want to bring your friends. You hope they bring their friends. Your dream is that a bustling, thriving new community is born and you get to wake up and contribute to it every day. The thought of selling it is painful.

The push philosophy is essentially one of greed and manipulation - the dominant mode of business during the last century.

The pull approach is more humble, more genuine and more productive. Naive - perhaps. But I would stipulate it is the creative force behind facebook, twitter, youtube, quora and many (if not most) of the biggest ideas - and businesses - to emerge over the last decade.

I suppose, assuming for the sake of argument there's a "slippery slope" where eventually a jello mold marries a sea turtle, - it's actually heterosexual marriage which is the first step down the slope.

This is a little devious, but it's a good way to get back at them and there really isn't anything they can say about it.

Wait until there is a third person around. Lavish praise on this 3rd person. Point out their brilliance, their intuitive sense of things. When #3 begins to get embarassed, contrast their modesty against their titan abilities.

The arrogant person will often blow a fuse.

This may be oversimplifying a bit, but : In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond asks the larger and older question : Why did great wealth and technology develop in Europe, Asia, and later the US ?

His answer is that these areas lie on the same lattitude, they're all about equally far from the equator. So their climate is very similar. This led to the evolution of "supercrops" like wheat and rice which can feed many more people per acre than any other crop. Also, docile and similarly productive livestock were spread throughout this lattitudinal band.

Once the supercrops had taken hold, they could be transferred to most any other location on that lattitudinal band. So Europe was able, for example, to simply recreate its super productive economic structure in the US.

People living on that band, basically, got a free lunch. This enabled them to do other stuff : export surplus food, raise armies, develop technology. Given this head start, these more advanced societies reinforced their lead through conquest and imperialism.

Take a look at this picture. It's earth at night. That swath of light - and all the development it implies - lies along the same lattitude that the supercrops grow.
(Note the dark blotch of communism.)

I just stumbled across a way to do this which is just a few clicks. It does use Wine - but Wine Is Not an Emulator (recursive acronym), so it doesn't take up space like a virtual machine, require a windows license, or incur the performance hit.

Go here and do what it says :

Netflix Desktop

This guy configured a Wine installation to steer around certain glitches and grab all the pieces you need in one go. Boom - netflix comes up. Awesome.

Much thanks go out to Erich E. Hoover for putting this together.

Here's an article that asserts that "Inside facebook, NEO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO."

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/07/16/inside-facebook-nfo-is-the-new-seo/

It was written in 2007, well before Facebook overtook Google in page views. Now that we spend much more time looking at our news feed than at search results, it may be time to remove the "Inside facebook" qualifier in the title.

I think the really hard thing for marketers is getting into the news feed in the first place. There's an extra hurdle now.

I imagine each of these types of people coming upon a new object - like the black monolith in 2001: a space odyssey.

Upon encountering the monolith :

The economist tries to weigh the monolith by measuring its shadow.

The scientist wonders if there is only one (monolithism) or if it's one of many (polylithism). He goes on a search for more monoliths. He never returns.

The consultant explains he is not surprised at all - that, in fact, this is exactly where he expected the monolith to show up. That trees have suddenly evolved. Monolith is the new tree. It's all monoliths now.

The programmer pokes the monolith with a stick in the hopes it reacts somehow.

The chess player tries to build a better monolith.

The politician takes credit for building the monolith.

The exorcist makes a pendant in the likeness of the monolith in the belief that wearing it bestows immortality.

The entrepreneur sells the exorcist's pendants, of course.

(EDIT - last answer was too brief.)

Good points here, to which I would add :

It may have been impossible to prove Bin Laden guilty of anything. He was good at dodging surveillance; never admitted to ordering the 9/11 attacks; organized al Qaeda in 'cells' which were semi autonomous. We have OBL bragging on video after the fact, but that isn't proof - he could be stealing credit after-the-fact.

Bin Laden was trained by the CIA to fight in the Mujuhadeen against the Soviets. He probably knew a lot of things about the CIA the US doesn't want made public, or leaked through attorney-client privilege.

This is a little spy-novelly, but there is a remote chance he was taken alive and his 'burial at sea' never happened. The CIA has done weirder. Having Bin Laden as prisoner - and nobody else knowing - may have been an advantageous option.

In 1990, I woke up and read a newspaper.

In 2000, I woke up and read the cnn homepage.

In 2010, I woke up and read facebook.

The difference is that content is now being fed to me by my friends, not a central corporation.

Put another way, now we're all broadcasters.

A person born in the "digital age", who never knew life without a search engine or email.

Roughly, anyone born in the early 90's in the USA is a true digital native, though the moniker applies well to people below 25 or so (as of this 2011 writing.)

Of course, billions of humans aren't there yet.

Cats with 3 colors are always female. (Rare exceptions are sterile.)

Mindblowing because i grew up around a dozen or so cats and never noticed.

Unlike a Turing Machine, the universe is non deterministic due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

This is very hard to swallow. Einstein never did.

You might be tempted to say the universe is really deterministic after all, there are just secret mechanisms we haven't uncovered, or it's just a limitation in the way we measure things. Bell's theorem proves this isn't possible.

Technically, Bell proves that either the universe is non deterministic, or there is no "Locality" - that is, we have to do computations involving every particle in the universe to make any sort of prediction, no matter how small.

We do observe locality, though. And we do observe Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle.

So, while the matter isn't completely settled, empirically we seem to faced with a non deterministic universe.

When pouring a cup of coffee, add the cream and sugar first. Pouring coffee on top takes care of stirring. (Thanks to DD for showing me this.)

When throwing out a plastic bottle, squeeze it smaller and tighten the cap. The vacuum holds - you don't have to empty the recycle bin nearly as often.

For guys : get a shoebox. At nite, put everything you have on you in that shoe box (keys, wallet, glasses, phone.) Never put these items anywhere else. Now you're ready to fly out the door in the morning. (Women solved this long ago with purses. I believe this is why ppl joke that guys can never find stuff and women can.)

[edit] Oh - I should add : Turn facebook chat off. And ... close that Quora tab :)

[yet another edit] The biggest time hack of all, if you live in an urban area, get a motor scooter. In most cities, a motor scooter with an engine 50cc or less is not a motor vehicle, it's legally basically a bicycle. Meaning you can park it on the sidewalk (chain that thing up!). Also, of course, you can slip right through a traffic jam. This can save an hour a day or more.

I would offer that to be a believer in God requires one to be humble. And humility doesn't say "I know, because God wrote in this book." Humility says "I don't know if God wrote in this book or not. I don't know anything, really."

If there is a God, there is one book He wrote in for sure : the universe. To study this universe is to seek knowledge of God's creation. And this creation story is stunning and beautiful almost beyond belief.

The book of genesis pales before the Big Bang. The graceful symmetry of the DNA helix - both sculpture and information processor - eclipses the tale of Adam and Eve. The great flood is a minor event compared to the Permian Mass Extinction. Three billion years of life : struggle, cataclysm, survival until finally creatures begin to write, to question, to read the book of the universe.

In humility, we find a much, much more awesome Creator.

tp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB95KLmpLR4&feature=relmfu

not technically a music video, but a trailer for the Social Network mashed over a choral version of the song Creep. This speaks to the connectivity and alienation of our age, and annoints a new generation of titans ...

Only at the death of Chuck Norris.

That is, never.

Without touching off a language jihad, I'd say that if you want to develop web sites in general then you want to master a web framework (UI + database + controller-logic). Ruby on Rails is more popular right now than Python-based frameworks like Django.

See Why is Django not as popular as Ruby on Rails?

I'd go with the most-used framework, because it opens up more job opportunities and makes it easier to get help from others. You'll find more examples and there are more open source contributors fixing and enhancing the code base.

But only for that reason. In terms of capability, Rails and Django are roughly equivalent.

Web frameworks aside, python does shine if you need to write some sort of 'algorithmic duct tape'. It's a very elegant scripting language for doing fancy stuff on the back-end; sort of a much more elegant version of Perl. A web crawler is a half page of code, for example. Its functional-programming heritage (think LISP) fits nicely with problems where you need to crawl, rank, optimise, pattern-match, etc. Its syntax is very, very small—there's very little language to actually learn. Python is often credited as being the 'secret sauce' at companies which need to do extensive calculations on the back-end (like Google).

So my recommendation is learn Ruby on Rails, but on the side pick up a bit of straight Python as an all-purpose scripting and calculation tool.

Again, jihadists, just my opinion. I'm sure reasonable people differ on this. :) (plz don't flame me :) )

Maybe - nothing. This graph from The Enonomist, Feb 20, 1999 might be right. :

We have just been through a period of head-whirling change.

Look at everything that showed up under our christmas tree in fifteen years :

The world wide web. Google. Wikipedia. GPS. Cell phones. Social networking. On-demand movies, music, books. The unviersal ability to broadcast : blogs, youtube.

Look also at all the creative destruction : record stores (i miss those), block buster, Encylopedia Brittanica, travel agents, etc etc.

It may be time to breathe. To just refine this stuff and maybe even reign it in a little.

If i had bet, yeah - i'd say there are probably a couple more big things coming soon. But I wouldn't be shocked if there aren't.

And I'm cool with that. It was quite a christmas morning, after all.

Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke.

I think one thing the Wikipedia community does well is handle what I call a Stage I Newbie. Somebody shows up, hasn't read the pillars, doesn't know what consitutes a reliable source, and just starts making mistakes like crazy.

The community is generally friendly and helpful and will guide the person to the policy pages.

Then s/he becomes a Stage II Newbie. The Stage II now understands what a RS is and gets the pillars. This is where things go wrong.

It's not long before the Stage II gets into the (normally spirited and constructive) debate in Talk. S/he is now in a position to be right , at least some of the time.

But they have a low edit count. They don't have lots of Wiki-friends. The opponent in the dispute does. Suddenly, a swarm of the opponent's friends show up. You know, just to "take a look at the article". Now the newbie is arguing with a hydra. Maybe they put a Disputed tag on the page - it gets reverted. "You don't get to do that."

In short, the problem isn't that the community rejects the clueless newbie. The problem is they reject the newbie the moment s/he becomes a capable contributor. The Stage II newbie has a choice - either go away, or join the game. Drive up their edit count, form alliances. The latter isn't of interest to most people, I think.

Suggestion : "Micro arbitration." When there is a debate dragging on like this - and especially when it involves somebody with a low edit count, there's a button they can press to quickly summon an admin. I think it would be important that the Admin is anonymous to the action - their username remains unknown to both parties. (The in-crowd of editors know many admins.) Perhaps the admin can be pulled randomly from a pool of volunteers - who don't necessarily need to be Admins in the true sense.

Details aside, there is a mechanism in place for a 3rd party to quickly resolve the dispute in a non-gameable way, based solely on its merits as already given in the Talk page. Nobody should feel badly about losing the decision. Nobody should hesitate to hit the button, as a learning experience if nothing else. It should be seen as a way to move things along faster.

The mere presence of such a mechanism may do much to inhibit "shoot the newbie" tendencies.

Rosalind Franklin, 1920-1958.

She took this picture, the first (clear) x-ray diffraction photograph of DNA, 1953 :

This picture gives away the overall structure of the helix (and the symmetry group she reported gives away even more.)

A guy she worked under (with?) named Maurice Wilkins showed this image - without Rosalind's consent - to James Watson who went ahead and built a model of DNA with Francis Crick.

Franklin was a relentless and innovative researcher. After her death her papers revealed that she had herself worked out the overall structure of the DNA molecule. She also had to labor under considerable institutionalized sexism at King's College - there were literally rooms she was not allowed to enter due to her gender.

Had Crick and Watson not beat her to print, she may have single-handedly made what is perhaps the most important discovery of the 20th century. In any case she was a critical part of it.

In 1962, the Nobel Academy acknowledged the importance of the x-ray work by including Wilkins in their award to Watson and Crick.

Franklin had died 4 years earlier.

Descartes addressed this, in his famous pronouncement "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am.)

He observed that we cannot be sure of the existence of anything - except ourselves. For to doubt the existence of something requires a doubter. In other words, the fact that you are wondering about the question itself means that you, yourself exist.

Everything else is fuzzy :)

To take a special case of Rob Weir's answer, one of the simplest and most impressive applications of the Fourier series is in musical synthesizers. (See Moog Synthesizer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moog_synthesizer and Fourier Synthesizer http://www.physics.ucla.edu/demoweb/demomanual/harmonic_motion_and_waves/waves/fourier_analysis_and_synthesis.html).

What's really cool is that it doesn't take too many superimposed sine waves to get close to a real world sound, like a violin string.

There's even an "app for that" : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fourier-synthesizer/id404166615?mt=8

This can be an engaging way to introduce students to the topic.

It is used in modern physics to model the dimension of time :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space
http://www.quantonics.com/Einstein_Minkowski_Space_Time_Diagram.html

"Never try to out-stubborn a cat." -- Robert A. Heinlein.

This one definitely comes close : Am I an elitist to think that most people are stupid? I worked to put myself through school, became an entrepreneur, and I’m happily married, fit, and healthy. I tell people my “secret” is commitment and hard work, but they just want shortcuts.

Napalm-bait.

We used to live in villages. Within walking distance of our jobs, the market, the town meeting places. We all knew each other's names. 'to call' someone meant you went over and knocked on their door.

We were connected.

Then came industrial society which bulldozed all that. We no longer knew our neighbors, we commuted to work, towns became cities where we walked among strangers. Most people sat home and watched TV for hours.

I don't think people had ever been lonelier. I wouldn't have blamed you for questioning the value of modern technology in 1980.

But social media returns to us what has been stripped away. Dozens of people know how i'm doing today, what i'm interested in, have a chance to meet up with me later for some live music.

We got our village back.

Frivolous? Ask yourself - suppose we solve the problem of peak oil, overpopulation - then what? What was it all for ?

To connect, to live a life engaged with others, to learn, to hear and to be heard.

Why wait ?

A compiler or interpreter is just a program, which reads data and does complicated things with it.

Every language you'll ever come across - that's actually used to solve real world problems - has a minimal set of features so that it's turing complete (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness). This means it can do loops, branches, store data - the basics you'd expect.

The first formally specified turing-complete language was the lambda calculus
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus). Interestingly, it was devised before the electronic computer. Any language can be translated into the lambda calculus. Put another way, every language is a trivial variation of the lambda calculus.

The λ-calculus could be used to make a λ-calculus interpreter (which is an odd thing to do, since you already have one.)
so λ-calculus -- interprets---> λ-calculus .

Since all languages are just variants of the λ-calculus, you can have :

λ-calculus --interprets --> COBOL
λ-calculus --interprets --> Python
λ-calculus --interprets --> C++

and so on. And it works both ways, since all languages are equivalent (technically, isomorphic), they can serve as the interpreter :

COBOL -- interprets --> λ-calculus
Java -- interprets --> Python

etc. Any language can be used to write any other language, since they are at heart the same .

It's interesting to look back on how languages got boot-strapped. All CPUs
can process machine code, so that's the starting point. At MIT in 1962, a LISP interpreter was written in machine code. LISP is a fairly direct adaptation of the λ-calculus. LISP adherents still regard it as elegant and effective (though it did evolve a little.) LISP wasn't really used to bootstrap any further languages. The LISP heritage still prevails at MIT (and influenced Python.)

In 1969, the C programming language was developed at Bell Labs and became the linga franca at Berkeley. While C and LISP are technically equivalent, C is 'closer' to the way the hardware works and LISP is 'closer' to the λ-calculus. C programs are very fast but it's hard to verify that they are correct, LISP is slower but it's easier to review and predict its behavior. C programs tend to be long, LISP tends to be short.

C was very much a bootstrapping language due to its speed. It was used to create C++, Java, and many other languages (and operating systems.)

I hesitate to answer anything addressed to 'brilliant web people :) But I think most web folks (of both the brilliant and semi-brilliant variety) would agree your next steps are :

JavaScript. This allows your to create more interactive web pages. Especially Ajax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)) which enables you to send and load data without refreshing the page. JQuery is a rich JavaScript library which helps with Ajax and other cool looking stuff.

If you haven't yet, get a local web server running like Apache http://www.apache.org/ and a database like MySql http://www.mysql.com/ .

So with JavaScript running on the browser, and PHP, Apache and MySql on the server (your local machine in this case) you have a complete development environment. As a short-cut for accessing the MySql database, you may want to pick up a simple database tool for PHP like readbeanphp (http://redbeanphp.com/).

Amazon's EC2 cloud is uber scalable and has a free introductory 'tier' : http://aws.amazon.com/free/ .

Quora runs on it, among many others.

It is 0.5, by symmetry.

We don't know anything at all about event A, let P(A) be the probability that it occurs.

We cannot say P(not-A) < P(A), because that implies some knowledge of A.
Similarly we cannot say P(A) < P(not-A).

Thus P(A) = P(not-A). Since P(A) + P(not-A) = 1 for any A, P(A)=P(not-A)=0.5

Ignorance implies symmetry.

However, we have to be careful when we go from A - essentially a closed envelope containing a condition we can't read, to an actual question like "is there an invisible teapot between earth and mars." Once we frame the question a great deal of information has begun to sneak in ...

I think we should let Einstein answer this one :

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. -- A Einstein, from his essay The World As I See It (http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay.htm)

It's a living magazine.

Every reader is also a writer and an editor. It captures, filters and arranges personal information, photos, articles, videos - anything that can be seen or heard.

It comes in different flavors depending on the size of the group and what they choose to focus on.

Facebook is a magazine with a couple hundred reader/writers (in my case) without much focus on any one thing.

The Quora magazine has a much larger group focussed on 'finding things out.''

Youtube is larger still focussed on video.

Traditional magazines like Time are still churning away, but now its articles are clipped out, filtered and distributed through these new social magazines.

The social magazine changes every minute, and you can add to it whenever you want.

Feedback loops. People can start valuing something stupidly - and everyone knows it's stupid - but the mere fact that others are doing it make it rational.

As in, "I know this beany baby isn't worth 50 bucks, but there is a bigger idiot than me willing to pay $100 for it." And there is, it's actually a rational move (until the crash.)

Result: People sell their houses to buy tulips. Endless bubbles and crashes destabilize the economy.

Witness the circuit-breakers built into the stock market by the SEC. This is basically the off-switch to the free market; an open admission that there are times when a feedback loop has rendered the market incapable of determining value.

This is typically done using a spline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_interpolation.

I did some work on the development of Symbian/Qt.

I agree with Horace, except that around 2008 Nokia "got it." They knew that the user experience was king, and went after it with billions of dollars. They couldn't do it.

What happened?

I think it's important to draw a distinction between the OS and the UI layer. The OS provides only the mechanism, you can layer any kind of UI you like on top of it.

For example, you can have a Unix OS with a (Mac) OSX UI layer, or else you can have X-Windows/Gnome (like my laptop.)

Symbian is much more resource-efficient than IOS or Android. And that still matters very much: the iPhone has crappy battery life, cameras suck on phones in general. By consuming less power and memory, space (and money) was opened up for a better camera, for example.

Have a look at the N8, a phone i'm still using.

The hardware was ground-breaking. That's a 12 Megapixel Carl Zeiss camera on the back. Xenon flash. Shoots video in HD.

Symbian's efficiency enabled the hardware engineers to fit that thing in there (well almost, note the bulge ;) And the battery lasts.

Epic hardware. UI - cumbersome. It's just "OK" in a market where OK doesn't cut it. Think windows 3.1. Workable at best.

Nokia tried to get a major carrier on board to release this in the US late last year. The carrier was ready to sign, but first did a simple test: put it on a table next to an android and an iPhone, and let some people in.

The verdict: "No way would I buy this." Result: The 'elopacalypse' - Elop throws in the symbian towel, and opens the gates to Microsoft.

Why couldn't Nokia - with billions to spend - put a decent UI on top of Symbian? Even though they could shift priorities, they couldn't shift the culture. It's an engineering, not a design, culture.

The UI issue, to them, was just another tech issue to be broken down into pieces, solved, and assembled. You just throw a lot of people at it. They built up from what they had:

They had Symbian. They also had a crusty old graphics layer called Avkon. They threw out Avkon, and bought Qt. Qt is a very capable toolshed for making UI's. So far so good.

Next they brought in "design people." Lots and lots of them. Committees generated reams of specs. Armies of programmers set to work.

But the specs kept changing. There was no cohesive vision of what the end-result would be. "Do windows have an 'X' button or a 'Back' button?
Does it leave the process running? I don't know, let's have a conference call on this, spec. item #2074." This sort of thing was going on during development.
A second graphics layer on top of Qt called Orbit was introduced - and then pulled out halfway through.

Like a movie that never gets made because the script is in re-write during production.

Speaking of movies, contrast this to the design approach of Steve Jobs, formerly of Pixar. Apple designs from the top down. It starts with pixel-perfect mockups, a walkthrough of the user experience. They arrive at a single, cohesive vision and hand it over to engineering - "Make this."

Nokia knew that the UI was the most critical part of the system. But on a cultural level, they didn't get that the UI was the purpose of the system, not just a tech problem to be figured out.

There's a great documentary which addresses this question and points out these features of pixar :

small, intense, close-knit group with a playful culture.

great stories

willingness to embrace new technology

the Jobs effect

really worth seeing, it's streaming on Netflix : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059955/

Anthony Hopkins nails it in Nixon (won the Golden Globe for it, got robbed at the Oscars.) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113987/

Henry Fonda in Failsafe http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058083/.

and the greatest of them all,

Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/.
Though he is upstaged a bit by George C Scott and Peter Sellers.

from a kid in elementary school :
"Nice shirt. We used to have curtains like that until my father got a job."

How many zen buddhists does it take to change a light bulb?

Two. One to change it, and one not to change it.

"I've been too fucking busy and vice versa." -- Dorothy Parker.

As Jamie said, this is the moment George McFly "becomes". This happens everywhere in literature (and life) ...

The Grinch stands atop the mountain and hears the villagers singing even though he stole all their stuff. He "becomes" and he - yes the grinch, carves the roast beast.

Dorothy hates kansas but finally emerges from her dream, "there's no place like home."

Benjamin realizes, at last, there is one thing that actually matters in a plastic world and pounds on the windows of a church during a wedding, "ELAINE! ELAINE!" He becomes.

As for McFly, his life is driven by anxiety and awkwardness. He has talent but no confidence. He'll never become a writer, he's going to end up Biff's abused underling. (He wouldn't have gotten the girl either, but there was no way to write that.)

Until that moment - his fist rises up and George looks at it as if it's another person entirely - which it is. It's shaking like the legs of a foal taking its first steps, or perhaps from the struggle between old-George and real-George.

Biff's head spins all the way back and he's knocked out cold by the full force of George becoming Mr. McFly, science fiction author and father.

I've never argued directly against another post before, but the "pack theory" of dogs and the "Alpha leader" notion persists among many animal trainers - it has been thoroughly debunked. (http://k9domain.org/alpha_theory.aspx).

A bit of history, the pack model comes from the study of wolves and the term 'alpha' was largely introduced by L. David Mech. The problem is that the wolves were not being studied in their native setting, unobtrusively, for long enough. The researchers jumped to conclusions.

It turns out that wild wolves are not arranged in dominance hierarchies, but rather simple biological families.

Mech repudiates the pack idea here, http://www.davemech.org/news.html

The concept of the alpha wolf is well ingrained in the popular wolf literature at least partly because of my book "The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species," written in 1968, published in 1970, republished in paperback in 1981, and currently still in print, despite my numerous pleas to the publisher to stop publishing it. Although most of the book's info is still accurate, much is outdated. We have learned more about wolves in the last 40 years then in all of previous history.
One of the outdated pieces of information is the concept of the alpha wolf. "Alpha" implies competing with others and becoming top dog by winning a contest or battle. However, most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating and producing pups, which then became their pack. In other words they are merely breeders, or parents

So not even wild wolves live in competitive dominance hierarchies, never mind their cousins who were domesticated 50,000 years ago.

So how to comfort your shy pup? I would suggest you speak to an animal trainer who does not ascribe to the pack theory. From my limited experience, I would suggest treating your dog like a child. Socialize it as soon as you can with other children (pups). Try to ensure the experiences are positive (not large or aggressive pups.)

Like any child, s/he is unique. Try to learn its likes, dislikes, and means of expression. Like a good parent, be calmly assertive, forgiving, constant.

Being There. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/

Spoiler alert : see comments for (spoiler) explanation.

Carlos' in Allston : Southern Italian fare, packed with locals every nite. Very casual, inexpensive -

http://www.carloscucinaitaliana.com/

It could be many things, I would approach the problem like a detective.

Something in the dogs environment, perhaps coupled with a memory from her past, may be making her nervous.

I'd suggest getting down on all fours to see things from her point of view. What's it like down there? Are there reflective surfaces around (like a trash can or the bowl itself)? Anything tall lurking a few feet away?

Is the floor cold? Is it tile so that her paws make a noise on it?

Scent is the dog's most acute sense : is the bowl clean? Is it near the garbage?

Does the location feel 'safe' or is it pretty much out in the open?

Is it near something that generates sound, like a refrigerator or an air conditioner?

Goldbach's conjecture is accessible to a high school freshman :

Every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes.

"Why" is of course tricky, but there are many open problems concerning prime numbers.

I'm going to come at this a little differently.

We start with an undeniable assertion :

The Zombie Apocalypse is coming.

Anyone who disagrees with this will be unprepared for it, and themselves be eaten or zombified. So they're not worth talking to.

Given the ZA is inevitable - we must recognize that while Romero's zombies have more historic legitimacy, being actually dead and such - there is no way they could pull off an apocalypse.

Slow moving zombies can't catch anything. You just walk right past them, as clearly shown in Shaun of the Dead. Poke fun at them if you wish.

The only way slow moving zombies kill anybody is when somebody freaks out and runs screaming, either breaking a heel or running straight into another zombie. Or else they lock themselves up with other people and begin fighting over who's in charge. Whilst zombies walk in the front door.

A slow-moving mass of zombies would be mowed down by teenagers with rakes and camera phones. The only negative effect on society would be that youtube would crash.

No, I'm afraid it'll be fast-moving zombies that will destroy civilization. And nothing is more legitimate than that.

Part of their success can be credited to some innovative 'sonic architecture' (to use Jimmy Page's phrase.) The Edge did a lot of experimentation with reverb, modifying chords, and trying hundreds of different guitars and strings.

Similar to bands like The Beach Boys and Boston : a signature sound emerged which is recognizable in a fraction of a second.

I'll take a stab.

Citizen Kane (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033467/), sometimes considered the best american movie. This film reflects on our greed, materialism, competitiveness and loss of soul.

The Right Stuff (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086197/). The story of the Mercury Seven astronauts. A celebration of american hubris, our sense that anything is possible and our disregard for authority.

The Graduate. A privileged young man graduates college and finds upper-middle class life profoundly disappointing and vapid.

American Beauty. Everyone in this movie - everyone - is lost, searching for meaning and beauty in a quiet suburban landscape.

American Graffiti. Called by Ebert a "brilliant piece of historical fiction", it reproduces life in 1962 (pre-vietnam, really what we think of as 'the fifties') so accurately that old timers say it freaks them out. So i'm told :)

104%.

You're nothing until you launch the prototype.

I think a lot of it boils down to the 'braininess' of the politician. We have had some presidents with quite prodigious recall like Clinton (his teleprompter malfunctioned during a state of the union address - he simply continued from memory without skipping a beat), JFK, and possibly Obama. These are guys who trust their memories, and are comfortable with analytic thought. They're not going to mess up 'billion' and 'million''.

But they're outliers.

Numbers have on occasion been used to devestating effect. From Martin Luther King,

About a hundred ninety-two negroes, on average, are registered to vote each month in the state of Alabamba. On the basis of this ... rate of registration ... it will take over five hundred years for half the negroes eligible to vote in Alabama to become registered. -- MLK

And

It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends five hundred thousand dollars for every enemy soldier killed, and only fifty three dollars annually on the victims of poverty.

But, for MLK too, at his most visceral he avoids numbers,

The bombs in vietnam explode at home. They destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America

Suprisingly, Neanderthal had both a bigger brain and a bigger brain-to-body-weight ratio. Where they smarter? Most scientists think not, a minority considers it possible. But there has been a generally accepted revision of the modern view of Neanderthal's intellectual capacity.

Firstly, they looked more like this rather than the guy in the geiko commercial :

They definitely had tools, and probably made this flute :

They also are considered to have had language and religious ceremonies.

Some scientists think that Neanderthal may not have been less intelligent than Homo Sapien, but instead were just unlucky, or perhaps less aggressive.

Winston Churchill was marginalized as a washed up crackpot during the 30's for repeatedly warning that Germany was ... acting a little funny ;)

Moderation.

Erosion of Leisure time : post industrial people have to spend more time to obtain the necessities of life. It takes more time to simply live. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html

Geographic sprawl negated the benefits of cars: Prior to the internal combustion engine, people generally lived within about 20 minutes walking distance of their place of work, shops, and social venues - that is, in a village. As cars and roads were created, we scattered these things out farther so now they are at least 20 minutes away and we need a car and we're burning up fuel like crazy and our cities are choked with cars.

Imperialism : Stronger nations - without a trace of apparent regret - routinely seize the resources of weaker nations, topple their governments, and invade them. This is done under the rubric of "protecting their interests."

Nuclear weapons : As stronger nations came into conflict over control of the world's resources, a nuclear arms race ensued where we actually built enough bombs to zorch the planet 100 times over.

Regimented educational system : We have a school system whose purpose is job training, not the development of the intellect. We take a billion young, inquisitive minds and force them to sit down and listen to some adult talk at them. What do the following people have in common? : Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Woody Allen, James Cameron, The Beatles, Lady Gaga, Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla, Andrew Carnegie, Frank Lloyd Wright. You guessed it - drop-outs. Einstein couldn't get a recommendation to graduate school.

Economic booms and busts : 100's of millions of people routinely end up without the necessities of life for no external reason; the capitalist book-keeping system simply goes haywire, goes into a feedback loop and fails to allocate labor, goods and services successfully.

We cannot walk around on our own planet : Every square inch of land has been sold off, except for a few Reservations (parks) and paved passage-ways on which we are expected to be in transit at all times. Amazing to reflect on, we cannot legally simply walk in any direction we choose.

My take :

Mankind's evolution is incomplete.

Man, in His current form, is still very much an animal unfit for the higher calling of the cosmos.

We see the apes fighting over the waterhole - though there's plenty of water for all of them and they belong to the same species. Later we see the Americans and Russians still locked in a cold war and ... exporting that cold war to the moon. Even though the earth is plenty big enough and they belong to the same species.

In scene after scene we see the animal nature of man : he is constantly eating.
The mechanics of ingestion is shown in great detail. We also see him going to the bathroom. Aside from that, he's pretty bored. Tanning himself. Playing chess.

Eating, lounging, fighting. He's not much different than his ape ancestors. The single-frame transition from flying bone to spacecraft (often called "The biggest flash-forward in film history") suggests modern man is not different at all. It's just more of the same.

Man is halfway there. He has mastered tools but not himself. He's learned to wield a bone but is still using it to bash his brother's head in. The US and Soviets are ready to blow up the planet.

The book 2010 explains that it was cold war paranoia that led to HAL's breakdown. There was fear the Russians might discover the alien beacon to Jupiter and get there first. To prevent any possibility of a leak, HAL was given orders to lie to the crew about the true purpose of the mission. This conflicted with another mandate HAL was given : assist and inform the crew in every way possible. The result was HAL went murderously bonkers.

The argument over the waterhole never stopped, and created a world filled with secrecy, suspicion, and on the brink of destruction.

In the final scenes, we see Bowman eating yet again. He drops a glass and it shatters. This being is imperfect.

He re-emerges as the star child, free of corporeal constraints - he appears composed of pure energy with no need to eat or fight. The entire earth and everyone on it are eclipsed both literally and metaphorically by this higher form of life which is worthy of the cosmos.

Zarathustra has spoken.

Strangely, the anachronisms are mostly off by a single year.

The mention of Three Mile Island on TV marks the present time as summer of '79.

A Rubik's cube is mentioned. These were released in 1980.

Joe's bedroom has a Star Wars model from The Empire Strikes Back, also released in 1980.

A Sony Walkman is mentioned. Also released in 1980.

So it may be that there is just one slipup - the TMI mention may be a 'cascading error'.

Take a nap in the afternoon. Then you get to wake up twice per day.

I would hazard that Dragon is 10 years too late. Everyone became really good typists.

Voice recognition took a long, long time to get workably accurate. In the last decade, an older generation relearned how to type and use a mouse. A new crop of digital natives can type like the wind.

Now that Dragon is finally ready, it solves a non-problem.

Guess :

Surprise, Dismay, and Relief.

Despite the US revisionist description of a "sneak attack"out of the blue, the US was already considering war with Japan and the Axis powers. We were shipping arms and fuel like crazy to Great Britain and halted all exports of oil to Japan, which we knew would drive them to desperate measures.

Isolationism prevailed in the US, after the pointless morass of WW I. But we also recognized that the Axis powers were on one hell of a winning streak; that as a nation with huge resources (especially oil and steel), and one of the victors of WW I, eventually we would be attacked. If we waited until then, we may have to fight both Germany and Japan alone. Great Britian was pleading with us to get into the war.

The US was deeply conflicted. Some wanted to stay out of it, no matter what. We'd defend our shores when the time came. Others wanted to jump in before it came to that. Yet others thought the problem would solve itself - Germany had already attacked our merchant ships. We'd be forced into the war soon enough.

A peacetime draft was instated over a year before Pearl Harbor. Many Americans were just waiting for the other shoe to fall.

It fell on Pearl Harbor - which was not yet American soil, Hawaii was not state.
We didn't think the Japanese could cross that much ocean, nor attack ships in such shallow waters. But - strangely, our most important military assetts, the aircraft carriers, had been moved out of Pearl Harbor virtually unescorted by battleships.

Dismay : We were in the war at last, and knew great sacrifices lay ahead, and some feared we may be conquered.

Relief : At last, we had a clear mandate, a united purpose. No more debate, no more waiting, we were suddenly united.

Henry Fonda and Peter Fonda (also Jane).

People walk up to a bar and order "a beer."

When the bad guys drive up alongside the hero and start shooting, the hero never simply slams on the brakes.

In the presence of slow-moving zombies, people run like hell until they fall or lock themselves up in a house. They don't simply walk away.

Nobody just leaves the haunted house.

Cavemen appear in the presence of T-Rex, an anachromism of 60 million years.

A hacker can break into a computer system in 3 seconds, tops.
A car that goes off a cliff always explodes.
People get suffocated/drowned in much less time than a person can easily hold their breath.

Every cigarette lighter in the world is a Zippo.

Vantage Point (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443274/) does nothing but that.

Evidence in favor of this being the last season :

Parker and Stone's 3 year contract is up.
Parker and Stone got really pissed that comedy central bleeped the mohammed episode. They are so intolerant of censorship that they lost the character of Chef (Isaac Hayes) rather than tone down their attack on scientology.
Parker and Stone have got to be richer than God at this point, and man - 15 years of anything has to be a drag.

Kathy Griffin wanted a Tony award so bad, she entitled her play "Kathy Griffin wants a Tony." So she seems award-happy, or playfully pretending to be (she already has multiple emmies.)

We'd have to include the Parthian shot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthian_shot). Cavalry archers would retreat, enticing the enemy to give chase.

Synchronized by a horn or some such; the retreating archers would suddenly flip backwards on their horses and send arrows raining down on their pursuers.

I think being in motion helps people block out visual information; our eyes tend to land on objects which are stationary. I notice that people who pace like this also tend to look at the floor for apparently the same reason.

To speculate further : people do this in order to imagine being in the other person's presence; an idea which is contradicted by their visual surroundings.

I will defer the answer here to a young woman named Erica Goldson, who graduated Valedictorian from high school in 2010. She took to the podium and absolutely devastated the "trained professionals" who put her at the top of the class. The full text and video are here : http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/open-forum/43254-hard-core-truth-about-modern-education-system.html

I will provide a few excerpts :

Some of you may be thinking, "Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn't you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

....
I am graduating ... at the top of my class. I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer - not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition - a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I'm scared.

....
We are more than robotic bookshelves, conditioned to blurt out facts we were taught in school. We are all very special, every human on this planet is so special, so aren't we all deserving of something better, of using our minds for innovation, rather than memorization, for creativity, rather than futile activity, for rumination rather than stagnation? We are not here to get a degree, to then get a job, so we can consume industry-approved placation after placation. There is more, and more still.

You don't. This is mythology that has its roots in the entertainment industry, and in the by-gone day of mechanical and electrical innovation.

In films that romanticize invention we get this notion that all we have to do is think something up and we are entitled to a life of power and riches. This is a literary device . It makes for a good script because :

The protagonist has an epiphany, a dramatic moment of awakening when the idea comes.

The protagonist then comes up against a nemesis who has stolen their idea.

The whole thing ends up in court, which provides an arena for the conflict to play out amidst great gravitas.

It makes a good movie. And it worked like this in the past, during the mechanical and electronic ages. An idea alone could redirect an industry and could be unambiguously captured in a single diagram.

For example, Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin changed the economics of cotton overnight :

For another, Nicola Tesla's polyphase AC generator made it possible to transmit electricity over hundreds of miles :

Both of these were powerful new ideas that could be legally protected and paid off.

It is not this way in the age of the internet. Because the internet itself is really the underlying invention. At heart, it's a set of interconnections between blobs of data. Sort the blobs and you're Google. Make the blobs personal remarks and you're facebook and twitter. Make the blobs video and you're Youtube. Make them order forms and you're Amazon.

It's all very exciting but it's not novel in the sense of the cotton gin and polyphase current. None of the companies I just mentioned were first. Lawsuits over IP are settled for tiny slices of equity or in cross-licensing agreements.

Your brilliant new blob-connection is too hard to distinguish from all the other blob-connections that exist now and the past.

Admittedly, this new world is brutal to innovators. Facebook can take a look at Twitter and say, "Hmm ... a constant stream of stuff. Let's do that too." Then it can look at Foursquare and say, "Location - let's steal that too."

As other posters have mentioned, the prize doesn't go to the "inventor". It goes to the one who best leverages network effects, who doesn't choke through stages of growth, who can evolve when things get big and as people change.

That's the real movie. A bunch of people working hard, trying, failing, and regrouping to try again. It's not as fun to watch but it's changing the world.

You should talk about your idea to as many people as you can. You never know when that next person will be the angel who drops the critical first round, the partner with a new twist on your idea, or the hacker who keeps your servers up the first night 10,000 people hit your site.

It is notoriously difficult to get big companies to listen to new ideas. You could create cold fusion using a dixie cup and pez eater, and energy company executives wouldn't return your calls.

I think this is due to a few reasons :

Big companies naturally become risk-averse. Any change at all is just more work, and exposes an executive to risk of making a visible mistake.

Big companies are already very busy with their own stuff and don't have the bandwidth to even consider new things.

Not Invented Here : "We're big cuz we're more awesome at this than anybody. Anybody outside this organization is by definition not as awesome, so their ideas can't be."

To cut through this, I would suggest contacting the CEO directly. S/he's the one who really has the company's best interest in mind and isn't afraid to rock the boat. Make your pitch very, very short because they are busy. Work out beforehand how you want to be involved/compensated. You of course risk them stealing your idea but them's the breaks.

Good luck!

Symbolics.com was the first domain ever registered in 1985.

Symbolics.com (1985)

I don't think so (would we recognize hard evidence if we found it? What would it look like?) The alien-descent theorists do have some interesting circumstantial evidence, or at least some good questions.

It is almost universal in human mythologies - across cultures and millennia - that beings descend from the sky. When you reflect on it, that's kind of a weird thing to make up.

The ancients constructed enormous 'images' that are only visible from the air.
This was build in Peru around 500 BC. It was only discovered in modern times when a plane happened to go over it. Why would ancient people build something none of them would ever see ?

"I'm gettin' too old for this sh!t" -- always spoken by a veteran cop

They need to "hack" it in order to populate it with faux search results that move the plot along. So there are legal issues up the wazoo, similar to using CNN's banner below a false news broadcast….

Yes.

My great great grandfather was a man by the name of Leonard E. Curtis. Curtis was Tesla's friend (to the extent that Tesla had normal friendships), helped Tesla secure funding and acted as his patent attorney during the "Current Wars."

In Curtis' memoirs (of which my family has about a dozen copies), he relates :

Curtis was a partner at he Colorado Springs Power Station and they invited Tesla to come out and conduct research. Offered him free power, arranged funding from such sources as JP Morgan. Tesla accepted the offer.

Tesla immediately began building one helluva big tesla coil in the hopes of transmitting electric power through the air. The result was actually comical -

Within a few seconds mini lightening bolts are seen at the tower. A few small fires are ignited around town as wire fences and such aquire electric charge. Then one or more generators explode at the power plant, plunging the town into darkness.

They had to hustle Tesla out on a train to prevent the towns people from kicking his ass (there was still a lot of Old West in Colorado in those days. He did return and fortunately was expert in generator repair.)

News of the incident travelled quickly through the power industry and its investors, and JP Morgan got word Tesla knocked out a revenue-generating power system in an effort to create a non revenue-generating one - that is, broadcast through the air. JPM also got word that Tesla had hopes to illuminate the atmosphere at night, possibly over the whole world.

So Morgan concluded that Tesla was brilliant but reckless and out of touch with financial reality.

In the early days, there was a backdoor password into any account which was a variant on "Chuck Norris."

Suprised to learn a new friend of his is gay, even tho a little straight-acting.

"I like my beer cold and my homosexuals flaaaaaaaming ...''

Another from The Dark Knight. A lawyer for Batman has uncovered his secret identity, and threatens to expose him unless he gets $10M a year for life.

Let me get this straight: You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands.

And your plan is to blackmail this person!?

I think there's a simple answer. You shouldn't feel bad because you can't help being unemployed right now (I assume).

I would say, "Thanx for lunch. I can't wait to be working so I can treat."

And when you do get hired, intercept that check before the waiter puts it down.
Cuz yea, they're on a fixed income :)

Some kids made a pretty good rap about the Large Hadron Collider :

The germans were first to split the atom in 1938.

Had the nazis recognized the potential of this development, delayed the war and put all their resources into development of the atomic bomb, it's easy to imagine that :

In 1943 the nazis are the sole possessors of nuclear weapons. Ten kiloton atomic bombs are dropped simultaneously on Birmingham, Lyons, Stalingrad, and Lodz.

More bombs follow and within a week the UK, France, Poland and Soviet Union have surrendered.

Within the next week the remaining European governments surrender without need of further bombing. The rest of the world soon follows.

You look down at your left arm, and there is a number tattooed there indicating your serial number as property of the Third Reich.

"Humor is the sudden apprehension of incongruity" -- CS Lewis

According to the book The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, the baring of teeth in simians is a fear response. It is the exact opposite of the aggressive response, where the facial features push forward (furrowed brow, dropped head, chin and lips pushed forward.) In the fear-smile, the features all pull back, head up, brow back, chin and lips back, teeth showing. As if the face is going to extremes not to appear aggressive.

In humans and perhaps other simians, the fear-response evolved into a voluntary expression of friendliness.

Fourteen racoons.

Leap from your chair mid conversation and exclaim "IT'S IN REVELATIONS, PEOPLE!!!"

Paranormal Activity earned almost $200M on an investment of only $15K.

This film had the benefit of posing as "found footage" where the audience doesn't even expect clean editing. It also had some good acting and viral marketing.

I think the answer lies in a deep cultural rift in the US : red states versus blue states.

Red states are perceived as working-class, white, church-going, somewhat poorer, conservative.

Blue states are perceived as urban, secular, ethnically mixed, liberal.

The identification within each group is a very strong one, and people don't want their friends to see any evidence that you're secretly defecting.

So people who listen to techno/rap/pop etc wouldn't be caught dead listening to country. And vice versa. A country music fan typically gets visibly disgusted at the sound of hip hop.

It's not really the music itself per se, it's that music is serving as the banner of two conflicting subcultures in america.

"New York is the dirtiest, largest, ugliest, broken-down city in the world-but it's the only one." -- Isaac Stern

"Every time I leave New York City I am amazed at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough." -- Dorothy Parker

"The city of right angles and tough, damaged people." -- Pete Hamill

Sure. You can see a demonstration of it at the Boston Museum of Science.

A large Tesla coil sits in the center of the room. A semi-evacuated tube will begin to glow brightly some 30-40 feet away.

Tesla had his whole lab equipped with such wireless bulbs.

To quote Austin Powers (as we all should, frequently),

"That's not something a dude .... should say ... to another dude."

Perhaps computer engineers are visual thinkers.

Alternating current doesn't lose (much) energy to heat over large distances.

With direct current, electrons are being pushed through the wire at a the rate of a few inches an hour. This causes them to collide with other atoms on the way, giving up some energy in the process. The wire heats up.

With AC current, the electrons are vibrating so there is no net translation in space.

AC current can be stepped up to a higher voltage (and lower amperage.)

Using transformers, volts can be exchanged for amps and vice versa. It's the amps that causes the loss due to heat. When electricity is transmitted over long distances, it is "stepped up" to a high voltage to minimize the amperage. This is why you see those high voltage power transmission lines.

As the lines get closer to your house, it is stepped down to 120 V at higher amps. Given the short distances, the heat loss isn't a big hit.

The second most popular author in the world, Stieg Larson, wrote a series of three books in his spare time after work. He made no attempts to publish them until all three were complete in 2004. At which time he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 50.

So one of the world's most popular authors never sold a copy in his lifetime.

His first book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, is being made into a movie in the US with a blockbuster budget of $100 M. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/) Coming out right before the holidays.

The Perfect Crime : Find a pair of conjoined twins. Have one of them commit a crime while forcing the other to go along at gunpoint.

There is no way they can incarcerate the guilty one because you can't throw an innocent person in jail.

This almost always happens, the effect is called "swing back." It's the opposite of "coat-tailing", where the winning party (for president) tends to pick up extra seats during the presidential election.

In the next two years, some of these "coat-tailers" - who probably wouldn't have been elected had the presidential vote gone differently - turn out to be weak legislators and campaigners. In years where bad stuff happens like military fiascos or economic meltdowns the effect can be sharp, as happened in 2010, 1994 and 1974.

A side effect of this is new presidents usually try to get their most important agenda accomplished during the first two years, in fact - in the first 100 days.

Danielle Maurer + Chris Knox = the full and definitive answer.

It's very important to include Chris Knox's grasp of the zeitgeist of 1984. (Note irony of year.)
I remember this very well because that law took effect August 1st, 1984. I don't have to look it up because that was my EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY. The law grandfathered legal drinkers in, so that somebody born a day earlier could drink legally. Literally, bars had this sign up, you had to be born *before* Aug 1, 1966 in order to drink. The day I was born. Goddammit.

The MADD thing was a pop culture phenomenom. You couldn't get away from the TV ads and the bumper stickers. There was also SADD (Student's Against ...) which purported to be a student based version, but was really the same organization recruiting young people. I went to one at my school and quickly realized that adults were running the show.

Like any organization with a political agenda, their real purpose was to grow and enforce that agenda. Politicians who opposed them were answered with gruesome posters of car accidents.

They got their way.

I had two objections then, and I still have them now :

1) If the problem is drunk driving, not just drinking - aim the legislation at the real crime. For people under 21, caught driving with a BAC above 0.00, mandatory sentence of 5 year license revocation, 400 hours of community service, $5,000 fine, seizure of car. These kids would walk/stumble home. They're not stupid.

2) Federal law allows for 18 year olds to be conscripted involuntarily and handed a loaded *machine gun*. If we have reservations about their judgement and impulse control there is no way we can justify this. Also, some of these kids will die in the defense of freedoms which they themselves are not entitled to in full.

The US military strongly resists this hypocrisy. The legal drinking age for soldiers outside our borders, or within 50 miles of either Mexico or Canada is 18.

Check out Groupon and LivingSocial. They often have 2-for-1 coupons for good restaurants if you're in a fairly urban area.

The ENIAC's (high speed) flip-flops used two tubes (triodes) coupled together.
(Actually, it used twin triodes housed in the same bulb.)

It's the same principle as making a flip-flop with transistors :

Tubes and transistors are often thought of as amplifiers, but also can be thought of as simply a switch.

In the diagram above, they are coupled together so that if one is 'on', it keeps the other 'off' and vice-versa.

It may also be instructive to consider how a flip-flop may be build with mechanical relays, the same 'mutually enforcing' principle is in effect :

This is a matter of principle. Nobody has a right to ask you to throw out a part of your past. Your girlfriend's insecurities are her problem, not yours.

There is a word for people who adhere to such principles : Single.

Toss the boxers dude.

Martin Luther King's 1968 "I've been to the mountain top" is, in my opinion, the most stunningly heroic speech made by the greatest american who ever lived.

In this speech, MLK makes it clear that he knows he is going to be assassinated.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. [...] But it doesn't matter with me now. [...] And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now.

It would have been easy for him to cancel his activities and simply get to a secure location for a while. He chooses death instead. A bullet may silence him, but he will not be silenced by fear. Towards the end his voice rises,

And I'm happy, tonight! I'm not worried about anything! I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

The next day he lay dead in Memphis.

A great many blackouts are deliberate, especially during powerful storms. This is done to prevent fires and electrocutions due to downed power lines ...

The ultimate chase scene is probably Quinton Tarantino's Death Proof.

Tarantino deliberately set out to make the best chase scene ever made, without cheating with any CGI.

All of the other speeches mentioned here are good, but there is one and only one best ever movie speech. It is the best movie speech, will always be the best movie speech; there is no possibility of rational debate on this subject. (A few answers have alluded to the film but not explicitly this speech : )

The speech in the movie Network http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/ where a TV anchor goes bonkers(?) and tells everybody to turn their TV's off. He savages the media in all its vacuous banality :

“There is a whole generation of Americans for whom the only truth they know they get through the tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents. This tube is the most awesome force in the universe . . . Who knows what shit will be peddled for the truth?

So you listen to me. Television is not the truth. Television is an amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. So if you want the truth, go to God. Go to yourselves because that’s the only place you are going to find any real truth.\

You are never going to get any truth from us. We will tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We will tell you that Kojack always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunkers house and don’t worry how much trouble the hero is in, just look at your watch. At the end of the hour he is going to win. We will tell you any shit you want to hear.

Illusions–none of it is true, but you sit there day after day. It doesn’t matter what color, what creed. You are beginning to believe the illusions. You are beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness. In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We on TV are the illusion.

So, turn off your television. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking right now, turn them off.

There is recent evidence that at least some mosquitoes are attracted to the smell of human feet. Who knows whether it's fungus, bacteria or something else.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=malaria-mosquitoes-follow-foot-smel-11-05-11

Would be an interesting experiment to try super-washing your feets next you're out at dusk ...

“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us - there is a tingling of the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the deepest of mysteries.” -- Carl Sagan

They're just trying to push you around. Don't fall for it.

Secretly, they probably admire your backbone. And girls like guys with self control and backbone :)

Sometimes, this :

Getting a klingon drunk.

Going for cheap laughs by leaving a stuffed Tribble on the bridge or pleading with Spock to "pull your finger."

Bringing up the Prime Directive.

Giving directions of the form : "Just head South for X miles ..."

I don't think Tesla demoed wireless power transmission in 1888; rather - he unveiled his polyphase current, motor and generator.

His wireless power transmission was demoed in 1891. The underlying principle
is similar to that of radio, a big tesla coil acts as the transmitter :

This transmitter is set to oscillate at very high voltage and high frequency. Like, really high voltage :

In its simplest form, the receiver was another, smaller tesla coil "tuned" to the same frequency. Again, just like modern radio. Electricty is transmitted in the form of magnetic waves.

Tesla had lots of variations on this idea like using the earth's crust to put it in 'resonance' and act as a carrier. He also discovered that partially evacuated glass tubes, without any circuitry at all, will glow in the presence of such a transmitter. (You can see this demoed at the Boston Museum of Science.) He rigged up his lab with such tubes, so he had lights he could put anywhere without wires. Tesla also had this notion of "Electrostatic Transmission" and a lot of fairly weird ideas, understandable because Tesla was pioneering in uncharted ground.

Here's tesla's patents for wireless transmission : http://ip.com/patent/US1119732 Some of it is a little hard to understand, again because Tesla was pioneering this stuff.

That you made a considered decision not to vote, that is, to abstain.

Legislators abstain from votes all the time. There is no stigma attached to it.

Reasons for abstaining from an election may be : you didn't become informed of the issues and candidates in time, you see no real difference between them, you have a fundamental objection to the current form of government.

I would go so far as to say this : If, on election day, you do not have a preference grounded in careful consideration of the issues and candidates - you have an obligation NOT to vote.

Not even close, this planet can take a helluva whallop.

65 million years ago an asteroid collided with earth, forming the Chicxulub Crater (180 km wide) :

The energy released was equivalent to 100 teratons of TNT.
This is equivalent to 2 million explosions of the Tsar Bomba (50 Megatons - the largest bomb ever detonated.)

This event may have caused Cretaceous–Tertiary mass extinction, but the
earth held together and life recovered.

Tough planet.

cheating a bit, but Raising Arizona (1987).
The actual credits don't appear until 10 minutes into the movie, after all the crazy, misguided characters have been introduced and their colliding plot lines set in motion. In a way, the opening credits is 10 minutes long.

Really worth the wait. "Y'all without sin, cast the first stone ..."

"Now, listen! Why is it that everything today has involved things either going in or coming out of my ass?!" -Eric Cartman, Episode 1

"He looks like somebody tried to put out a forest fire ... with a screw driver."

"I'm not your friend, buddy." "I'm not your buddy, pal." "I'm not your pal, friend" ...

"In Japan, we can not achieve much, with so small penis ..."

"That? That was ... a pidgeon." Officer Barbrady in response to a bunch of black army helicopters going.

And my all time favorite : "Perhaps Mother Nature is best left to her simple, one-assed schematics."

One scientologist - (the late) Isaac Hayes (Chef) quit the show because of that episode.

There is good evidence that Tom Cruise strong-armed Comedy Central into not rebroadcasting Trapped In The Closet on March 15, 2006. Comedy Central is owned by ViaCom which also owns Paramount Pictures. Cruise allegedly threatened to refuse to any promotional touring for Paramount's Mission Impossible III if they reran the show. This has been called "Closet-gate."

John Nash is best known for two things, which are very different in character.

First, he defined the Nash Equilibrium, which made the nascent field of game theory robust enough for such real world subjects as economics and military strategy.

Prior to the Nash Equilibrium, John Von Neumann basically created game theory and dealt in mostly zero-sum, 2-person games. That is, two players are directly opposed to each other's interest; whatever is gained by one is taken in equal measure from another (like two people playing poker.) Neumann found techniques to calculate solutions (best strategies) for such scenarios.

But the two-person zero-sum game is pretty rare in fields like economics. Usually there are N players and there is not a fixed set of "payoffs." For example, three software companies may be competing to create music players for computers. By cooperating on, say, the file format of music - they can increase the total pool of customers they are competing for. Or, two companies may collude to drive a 3rd out of business. There is a mix of competition and cooperation and a changing total payoff.

The Nash Equilibrium gave a mathematical definition to the notion of a winning strategy in these more complex scenarios. It's very simple: A best strategy is one from which a player has no incentive to deviate, even if he knows all the other player's strategies. That is, it's stable.

As simple as $F=ma$ and as fundamental. Nash joked that "I've won the Nobel Prize for my most trivial work." The Nash Equilibrium became ubiquitous in economic theory.

As they say, once - you're lucky. Twice - you're good. Nash's second big achievement was not simple; it was an act of almost superhuman mathematical virtuosity. Nash solved an open problem in mathematics, the embedding theorem.

The embedding theorem states that "that every Riemannian manifold can be isometrically embedded into some Euclidean space." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_embedding_theorem).

This result was counterintuitive. Most mathematicians wouldn't have believed it, much less tried to prove it. Nash's proof has been described as a "bunch of weird inequalities" that somehow come together to produce this startling result.

Nash's son, also a mathematician (and also schizophrenic) would identify his father as the one who "solved the embedding problem" without mention of the Nash Equilibrium, presumably because the latter is so simple and obvious to professional mathematicians.

I think it's strictly a plot device. Will's father's relapse alone wouldn't motivate such a reaction. Even a temporary remission from Alzheimer's would be a huge step forward and the most promising area for future research.

But in the movie, Will's the good guy and his boss Dave is the bad guy. The virus does a good thing - make apes smart, and a bad thing - wipe out the human species.

This plot device - Will's sudden turnaround - gives credit to Will for the good part and places blame on David for the bad part.

If we had only listened to Will, we'd have smart apes and no viral apocalypse.

But along came David. Maniacs! You blew it all to hell! :)

Einstein famously responded to the Uncertainty Principle with the quip, "God does not play dice." Most people haven't heard the response by Niels Bohr,

"Stop telling God what to do."

I think social media is a vindication of Network's central premise :

Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything
that didn't come out of this tube.

This tube is the gospel,
the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents,
popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world.
...
So, you listen to me. Listen to me!

Television is not the truth.
Television's a goddamn amusement park.
Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers,
dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players.
...
So if you want the Truth ...

Go to yourselves! ...

In God's name, you people are the real thing.

We are the illusion!

Non-Verbal Communication and Body Language.

Desmond Morris studied human body language extensively in his book, The Naked Ape. His treatment of the subject is not exactly scientifically rigorous, but many of his observations ring true.

A woman, when she finds herself in the presence of a man she considers attractive, will almost always touch her hair, in a quick, primal grooming gesture. Watch next time you're clubbing. It's true.

A man will do something similar when he is trying to show deference to another, more dominate male. For instance, a guy explaining himself to the cops is likely to brush back his hair, palm down. Note - many cops shave their heads entirely.

A man's face flushes red in response to fear. When the face goes white (which is rare), he has entered a dangerously aggressive state (get away from such a person, quickly). This is the origin of the phrase "white rage." Blood has been transferred to the limbs in preparation for attack.

A liar won't avert his gaze, contrary to popular belief. People typically look away when trying to access a memory. A liar tends to maintain gaze with the questioner, to judge their reactions.

The 'boss' (male) in a given situation will assert his stature by assuming an exceedingly casual posture. Arms, legs spread apart. Sometimes under-dressed, he is broadcasting that he has nothing to fear and nobody to impress.

Most likely a limited nuclear exchange, possibly escalating to WWIII.

Syria and Egypt had the strong material backing of the USSR. Everyone knew the Soviets were providing arms, but neither Mossad nor CIA realized how extensive and sophisticated the support actually was.

Egypt had executed a brilliant bit of PR subterfuge; one year earlier they pretended to have a falling-out with the Soviets. Egypt's complaint was that the Soviets weren't providing enough weapons, and expelled 30,000 Soviet 'advisors' over the issue. It was all a ruse.

The ruse worked; the USA and Israel had dropped their guard.

These tactics are described in the book, The Six Hour War According to a Military Correspondent's Diary, by Abd al-Satar al-Tawila (military correspondent for Rose-al-Yusuf).

The point is Egypt was about as important to the USSR as Israel was to the US.
To turn the tables : Imagine Egypt had a few nukes, Israel had none. Egypt nukes Tel Aviv. The US - without hesitation - would have retaliated against Egypt. The most likely response would be one of 'parity', exact same size bomb, dropped over a similarly populated area.

And this is what we could have expected the Soviets to do: respond in equal measure and nuke Israel.

There is a chance the conflict would end here, at 'parity'. The superpowers would hold emergency negotiations with an eye to swiftly ending the conflict as this war is not in their interest.

However, a number of things could go wrong : Had the Soviets hit back with anything more than 'parity', the US might have launched a massive attack against the Soviets. Or, if after a 'parity' exchange, Israel futher attacked Egypt or even the Soviet Union, the Soviets would hit back massively and the US would again attack the USSR with everything they had.

There is also some risk of simple malfunctions and misunderstandings as a result of the EM-pulse knocking out communication and blinding warning systems that could lead to escalation.

One thing was certain : The Egyptians were on course to invade Israel, and Israel was planning to nuke Egypt when they did. The US wanted to avoid that at all costs.

This was almost the entire motivation behind Kissinger and Nixon's decision to airlift massive arms to Israel.

Saturday Night Live (does that qualify as a series?)

This nation has had more than its share of great moments. The Wright Brothers first flight. VE day. The moon launch. And the older among us will never forget when, in the mid seventies, on live television, Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtain sat at a news desk engaged in a political debate. Jane presented her case in a factual, well reasoned, articulate way. When she had finished, Akroyd simply turned to her and said,

"Jane, you ignorant slut."

Hard to top Charge of the Rohirrim, but here's a few that come to mind :

The grand daddy of them all, none other than the Dawn of Man from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 movie). Our ape-like ancestor has just had an encounter with an alien artifact, a black monolith. The monolith either increased his intelligence or planted ideas in his head.

He gets by foraging for nuts and berries. His hands have evolved to grip tree branches - not a very useful trait on the ground. He's a rather timid herbivore in the midst of fearsome predators. He'll probably go extinct.

But then he sees a bone on the ground. He thinks. He thinks some more. He grasps it. The first tool and weapon in hand, he has seized the destiny of Mankind :

In Race for the Double Helix (BBC, 1987), Watson and Crick discover the structure of DNA. Crick describes the beauty and simplicity of the "secret of life" as the camera lovingly circles its graceful symmetry :

From 4:45 to 7:50 (don't bail before 6:45, the true climax) :

You've seen The Truman Show.

A movie like that would never be shown inside the Truman Show, lest it lead to the main character asking questions like ... yours.

I stumbled upon something that works astonishingly well.

Get yourself a really cool scooter. Like this :

Everywhere you go, strangers will ask you about it.

a) If you had one month to live, what would you do ?

b) What are you waiting for ?

High octane gas is better : (delivers more power, burns cleaner, etc.)

This is perhaps the most successful marketing scam ever; it exploits some confusion about high performance engines.

High octane gas is harder to ignite. It takes more heat to make it go bang.

The spark plug creates temperatures hot enough to ignite anything, so high octane burns fine in a normal car. Not better, not worse, just the same.

So why does high octane exist? It's about the moments before the spark plug fires. High performance engines compress the fuel/air mix to such high temperatures that it can ignite prematurely. This is called "engine knocking." Engines with a high compression ratio require high octane gas. Other engines don't benefit at all from it.

High octane gas got associated with high performance, and people got the idea they can improve performance by putting premium gas in their car.

Here's a Scientific American article on it :

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-premium-g

So leave the 93 pump alone, and use the savings to buy some coffee - which has been shown to improve performance :)

Europeans thought the earth was flat when Columbus sailed for India (and hit the New World instead.)

I don't know this piece of folklore made it into history textbooks in the USA. Europeans had known for centuries that the earth was round and in fact knew its circumference to be ~25,000 miles at the equator (as did the ancient greeks).

Columbus somehow got it into his head that it was much shorter.

Many people correctly warned Columbus that this trip was way too long for his supplies and he and his crew would starve on the way. Which they almost did until they got lucky and stumbled on the New World instead.

Here are some sources :

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/history/1997Russell.html

The "Flat Earth Myth" apparently got its start in 1838, with this erroneous account : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Life_and_Voyages_of_Christopher_Columbus

The last thing the late Robertson Davies ever wrote. He was old, near death, and seems to have known it. The last paragraph of his last book, The Cunning Man , is a very poignant goodbye :

“This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight.”

Gone. An historical footnote. Nobody under 30 would recognize their logo.

In the mid nineties Apple had completely lost its focus. Too many product lines of yawn-inducing beige hardware, completely ineffective marketing. Their products were sold mainly in Sears where staff didn't have the training to keep the demo models working, much less answer consumer questions. Apple didn't even manage to negotiate prominent displays for them. Apple was also licensing its OS to other manufacturers, giving up control over the quality of the end-product.

And Apple had run out of cash. Out of desperation the board of directors brought Steve back.

Jobs regained control of manufacturing. He somehow managed a $150M investment out of Microsoft (I never did figure that one out) to keep the company afloat. He slashed product lines. He refocussed the company on making one great product : the iMac. He made bold simplifications. The floppy drive - gone, deprecated by the internet.

I remember walking into a Sears in 1998. A table featured 4 iMacs in various bright colors. People couldn't stay away. You had to walk over and check it out. As you approached, you noticed it had a handle on top. You could just grab this thing and walk down the street with it.

Did looks really matter that much? You bet your ass they did.

Jobs was back and you could see it.

Apple never lost money again. After over a decade of bold and relentless innovation, Apple's market cap overtook the giant that threw them a bone in '97.

At the risk of oversimplifying:

How did we get into this mess?
How do we get out?
How do we prevent it in the future?

I expect there was deep, smoldering resentment between the two.

Jobs certainly felt ripped off by Gates when Microsoft released windows. Gates' retort that Apple and Microsoft both stole the GUI from Xerox doesn't hold up :
Jobs had paid Xerox to get a look at it. Jobs then went off and perfected it with his usual ... perfection. Gates outright stole it - using a prototype Apple entrusted him with as a head start - and Apple floundered for years in a niche market.

I don't think a meglomaniac like Jobs ever gets over that.

Gates, on the other hand, won the game but was denied the public accolade. That word so often used inside Microsoft - Innovation - was rarely invoked by others. A movie portrayed him as a cunning copy-cat. A federal judge publically declared that Microsoft made crappy software which damaged consumers. Gates had won the trophy but not the respect it should have carried.

I don't think a meglomaniac like Gates ever gets over that.

I think the essential difference is :

A smartphone is designed to be used in the hand and fit comfortably in your pocket. It's always on you. This demands low weight, high durability, small size, long battery life, an interface that's usable with a single thumb - the primary mode of interaction.

A tablet is designed to sit on the table or lap, to be carried in a case (or backpack etc.) Having it with you is optional. This allows for it to be heavier, with bigger screen, shorter battery life, less durable, and more use of multi-touch in the interface.

The cloud has begun to make this a non-question.

For a lot of great engineers, the work resides in the cloud, on a Unix box (or VPS, etc).

The laptop has become just a graphical terminal to the cloud server. Because the Web itself has become the real OS, there isn't much for the client to do but render.

The client-OS is fading into irrelevance.

~ 15% of the world's population died in the An Lushan Rebellion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion) in Northern China, 755-763 AD. About 30 million died out of a world population of 200 million.

Yes. Much.

It comes from the South Park episode Ginger Kids. Free to watch here : http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s09e11-ginger-kids

Carrot-top once pulled this out and yelled, "NEVER BUY POT FROM THE EASTER BUNNY!"

The most accessible walk-through of this is probably found in the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979 book) .

Imagine the alternative.

At age 40, you hit the wall. Everything and everyone there is to know, you know.

Now what?

I am always amazed at how the Ancient Greeks considered questions of such modern relevance.

Aristotle had this view : When we ask how things came into existence, there are two possibilities :

a) There is an endless chain of causes. Every time we think we've gotten to the "first event" (like the big bang, in modern cosmology), we discover an even earlier event which caused that. So we just keep going back and back, and never find the answer.
b) There is a finite chain of events, beginning with the Primum Movens - "Prime Mover" or "First Cause." Aristotle thought this was the case. He pointed out that the Prime Mover is itself unmovable, or put differently : The First Cause is not caused by anything else. Aristotle thought the First Cause was an enormous buildup of energy - not far from our modern conception of the Big Bang.

The First Cause could be the Big Bang, it could be God, or as yet undiscovered.

The key point is, if we are to entertain the possibility of a First Cause, we must be prepared to accept that it wasn't caused by anything at all. That is, we have to stop asking how it got there.

I'm down.

Hold the financial sector responsible.

The Occupy crowd says a lot of crazy shit, but there is a core set of beliefs which seem to emerge :

Financiers created the 2008 economic crisis by :

Creating exotic investment instruments called 'derivates' which were essentially loopholes in existing regulations. We need new laws to prevent this. (Some will say this is a done deal : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051302393.html)

Committing outright fraud. Madoff is the most famous case, but there are many, many others : For example, Bank of America is accused by AIG of fraudulently inflating the credit ratings of toxic mortgage-backed securities. http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/aig_alleging_massive_fraud_sues_bofa_over_mortgage-backed_securities/ Those commiting fraud should go to jail.

Using their considerable influence over elected officials, the very wealthy perpetrators of this disaster had a soft landing. "Too big to fail" bailouts and fat bonus checks. In light of this, Reign in Corporate Influence over Washington (never had that one before ;) and Make em pay (big fines for individuals and corporations, extra taxes which essentially revoke bonuses paid for with tax dollars.)

To compensate for the resultant unemployment, redistribute some wealth from the wealthiest 1% to the other 99%. See http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61370.html. There is also the general objection that the wealthiest 1% generally don't pay enough taxes, economic meltdown or not.

What Patrick Thomson said, also : LISP (and other functional languages ) are easier to parallelize. So they were often the lingua franca of cool looking supercomputers like the Connection Machine :

Q) How many electricians does it take to change a light bulb?
A) One. They are quite skilled at that sort of thing.

Q) What's worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm?
A) The Holocaust.

Brian Roemmele is a virtual firehose of first rate - and often startling - content.

His answers are more like polished articles, with rich use of imagery. See, for instance -

Where are the world's largest, modern "Ghost Cities"?

and

How does the Göbekli Tepe find change our view of human history?

or just peruse his Answer wall.

Nnnnnnnnnewman. "When you control the mail ..... you control .... information. Mwahahahahahaha ..."

A candidate for the architectural zenith of the ancient world, the Colosseum.

It would be a stunning work were it built today with modern technology. It seats as many people as modern football stadiums. But unlike our stadiums, this was built to stand for thousands of years; the sweep and detail of it is almost beyond belief.

This video does a nice 3D virtual reconstruction :

There may not be a way. If check-in apps were going to take off, they probably would have. When user growth stalls out like this, it's often a case of a head-on collision between ambition and reality.

Location-based services would love to duplicate the explosive growth of Facebook. But Facebook benefits from network effects that check-ins lack : Facebook is attractive and socially interactive. Check-ins are not.

Attractive :

Why join facebook? To find people from your past. There's a whole pile of people you know in there. Some you haven't spoken to in a decade. There is no good alternative way to find them. This is attractive as hell. Thought experiment : stay away from facebook for a week. Ouch. It's become imperative.

Foursquare? So you can broadcast where you are. Unlock prizes. Become a mayor. Imagine not doing any of that for a week. Big deal.

There's just no imperative here.

Socially Interactive :

The more you use facebook, the more interesting it becomes. A status update brings comments. People get tagged in your photos. Every action you take invites reactions from others - you keep coming back to check.

But when you check-in, there just isn't that much your friends can do in response. So now you're there. OK.

Right now is two hours too late.

My friends might have been interested to know I was going to be in this cafe. Two hours ago when they could have arranged to come as well.

Getting reviews of the food at this cafe would have been great. Two hours ago.
Before I decided to come.

The cafe owner might have been interested in offering me some kind of incentive to come and check in at his cafe and buy stuff. Before I decided to come.
Now that I'm here, he has no motive to do that. Sure, he may want to lure me back with a coupon. In which case he can walk over and hand it to me.

The bottom line : Your real-time location isn't of much interest to your friends or even to businesses. A far richer social experience is to announce where you're headed on your Facebook status.

Because too many people think they can do it.

It's easy for people to look at a great product or web site and think, "I see why that's good. I understand design." But they don't.

When most people look at a fledgling design, their first instinct is to expand and complicate it. They get ideas for really cool things to add.

Great designers do just the opposite. They look for stuff to take out. They reduce and simplify.

At first, Facebook didn't do many of the cool things MySpace did. But it had a much better design.

In any organization, even a 2-person startup, it's battle between good design (reduce and simplify) and bad design (expand and complicate.) As the organization gets larger, the "stake-holders" overwhelm the designer. The committee of stake-holders are unaware that a) they have hijacked the design process and b) have no idea how to design.

This is more eloquently expressed in this incisive and funny answer : Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality?

It's an attribute of our brains.

It has to do with entropy. Entropy increases from the big bang forward. Heat dissipates.

Now think of your computer. It appears to be doing very non entropic things; to be creating order. Except for all that heat the fan is blowing out of the back of it. The computer has to dissipate heat in order to do its job. Which increases the entropy all around it.

So computers have to work in the direction of increasing entropy. Your brain is a big biological computer. Same thing.

Your perceptive frame of reference is moving towards increasing entropy, so that u can process, remember, etc. Your brain burns glucose like crazy and radiates heat.

(This example is taken from Stephen Hawking, sorry I don't remember where exactly. Hawking uses the term "Psychological Time".)

What Mark Eichenlaub said. Really excellent answer. If you're really pressed for time, a reasonable analog is a prism :

The signal - white light - comes in. It's separated into its component wavelengths. By measuring the intensity at different colors, we can even figure out what type of matter is luminescing (spectral analysis.) This is how we know what stars are made of.

As the prism does with light, we can use Fourier to look for the component vibrations of, say, the stock market, or the human voice.

Winston Churchill wrote this in 1901, decades before great cities lay in rubble and ash, before the searing flash over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the gas chambers, before a nuclear standoff almost became a Mass Extinction event.

In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed—when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

Stop.

Step back.

Walk away.

You don't do that. You don't read another person's texts or emails.
Ever. Ever.

Firstly, because you are violating their most basic rights as a person (as well as the other party they are writing to.)

Secondly, because it is quite possible you will discover something like this that upsets you. Could be a flirty comment to some dude. Or she could be venting about you after a fight. Things which are harmless so long as they remain private. Things never meant for your eyes.

What you did was worse than stealing $100 from her purse. At least you can give the $100 back.

Let your discomfort with the text be your penance.

Go, and sin no more.

Agree with Caz Lessels : it's The Stand, hands down.

While the rest of King's best work is brilliantly creepy, The Stand is less so. Rather, it is staggering in its scope and depth.

A quiet malevolence flutters unnoticed - just a crow. He is an agent of Satan.
He uses man's own devices to herald his destruction : a weaponized killer virus.

So the Apocalypse is on. But unlike so many other Apocalyptic tales, King takes his time. From the first few cases, to the rumors, the run on supplies, the government coverup, the panicked evacuation of cities and the final collapse of military order. I don't think the staggering rundown of human civilization has ever been described in such chaotic detail.

And that's just one amazing thread of the novel. It's as if King crammed 5 great novels into one (yes, it's a big book.)

It is also a Biblical prophesy lifted right out of Revelations. The apostate of Hell - the Walking Dude - is no ordinary villain. He is soft spoken, charming, folksy. He's funny. You'd like him. He's evil personified.

It is a coming of age story. The young Harold Lauder - pimply, pretentious and horny - finds his way through the wreckage of humanity, makes good use of his brains and eloquence to become a valued and respected member of the survivor community, something he never was pre-plague.

It is greek tragedy. That same Harold Lauder, deprived the affections of a girl he is crushing on, pens the ultimate expression of hubris : "We are often told that we must change for the good of the world. But the world must change for the good of me." He defects to the dark side. Only hours before his death does he repent.

It is a road trip. We follow assorted bands of survivors as they make their way to either Las Vegas (dark side) or Boulder (light side.) Here again, King takes his time. We stop in little towns, we feel the shoe leather wearing down, we feel our bodies getting leaner and our minds clearing. Some are made stronger by the journey, others are broken by it.

There are scenes of great poignancy. When the plague first escapes the bio-lab, it is carried by a security guard who decided to run for it. On an empty back road, in the middle of the night, a great sand-plume rises behind a sole rusty yellow car. The seed of humanity's doom.

The characters are unusually distinct, and there are a great many of them. They stay with you after you finish the book.

It's not really a dark novel (aside from the small detail that 99% of humanity dies.) It's more akin to Star Wars, where the forces of good and evil interplay - often within the same person.

OK, enough gushing I guess. I like this novel so much that I read all 1000 pages six times. And I have the attention span of a neutrino.

Most likely it's due to their age. (Why older people avoid contacts is an interesting question. Were contacts not yet popular during their opinion-forming years? Or - as we get older, do we simply get less vain and more practical [contacts can be a pain.])

I am from there. There isn't much to do, really.

Historically, it's known for being burnt down by Benedict Arnold in 1781, and being virtually flattened by the hurricane of 1938. And then catching fire. So notable for its flammability.

It's now home to the US Coast Guard Academy and Connecticut College (where my dad taught.) Both campuses are rather insular so there isn't as much as a student vibe as you might think.

New London is heavily influenced by a massive naval presence across the river in Groton : A naval base and nuclear sub manufacturer (Electric Boat.) Together with the Millstone nuclear reactor complex a few miles up the road in Niantic, these comprise the areas primary employers.

My answer is rather simple minded but ... here it is.

Absent any divine mandates, just strive to be useful to others.

"Yea, but I'm beautiful when I get respect." And walk out.

Lack of reverence for chowda. Like many great dishes, chowder began as a poor man's sustenance made with local ingredients. Its legacy goes back to the early settlers. Nobody makes it the same way, and recipes have been passed down for generations.

If you have chowder at a restaurant, the server is almost certainly is going to ask, in the most casual tone : "So, eh, how is yowah chowda tonight?"

This is no question about soup. It translates to : "What do you think of our restaurant? Of me? Of my ancestors? Of our great nation, forged in blood and turmoil in the wilderness?"

Don't panic. You answer, "This is the best chowder I've ever had." They will say, "Eh, it is, uh, good isn't it?" and walk away.

Everywhere you go, it is the best chowder you ever had. Never faint praise like "it's good." Qualifiers like "it's some of the best chowder i've had" is dangerous.
It's the best. Everywhere.

Legal Seafoods likes to boast that their chowder is served at presidential inaugurations. They say it on their menus. Their napkins. On the radio. Because it's all you need to know.

And of course, do not ever, ever, ever, send the chowder back.

Sometimes, a great joke pops into your head, and bypasses the "is this really a good idea?" censor.

My first job out of college. Day before Thanksgiving. My boss says to me, "Oh geez. Just found out my elderly uncle died. Now I have to call everyone to say he won't be coming to thanksgiving."

Me : "Now that is an understatement !!!"

Ooooooh ....

Downvote her.

This seems weird because we are used to thinking of subatomic particles as point-masses moving in newtonian ways.

The electrons around a nucleus are not really 'orbiting', they exist as standing waves which surround the nucleus.

The photon (itself a wave packet) interacts with that "shroud" around the nucleus. Can't miss it.

An inequitable end to World War I. Tensions were left simmering between the combatant nations. Germany was especially humiliated, forced to concede land and make reparations. While these material losses are often cited by historians as the cause of WWII, they weren't that devastating. But German national pride was deeply wounded.

Hyperinflation. Germany had borrowed a lot to fund World War I. Reparations also accounted for about 1/3 of their deficit. The Wiemar Republic began to just print money. Their currency collapsed and people went hungry. The aftershocks of hyperinflation continued throughout the 20's.

The Great Depression. Just when Germany's economy was beginning to stabilize, a global Great Depression pulled the rug out from under them.

Adolf Hitler. A master manipulator of public opinion, electrifying orator, ruthless political maneuverer. He blamed the Allies and the Jews for hyperinflation. He warned of Germany falling to a conspiracy of Jews and Communists. By evoking resentment and fear, he quickly turned Germany into a fascist warrior-nation hell-bent on war with its neighbors with all of its industrial capacity and military agility.

Here's a time sink I've found that can be sort of rewarding. It requires workable in-flight wifi.

Become a virtual explorer : Bring up googlemaps, zoomed out view of the united states. Click anywhere (I like the mid west) and start zooming in. The idea is to land on some quiet little town, in the middle of nowhere, that you otherwise would never know about.

One rule I like to have is : the town must have at least one movie theatre. That indicates some kind of cohesive culture, and not just a few blocks of houses and a gas station.

Get down to street view. Get a look at as much of it as you can. Read up on their history. The last five years. Hunt down some residents on facebook, tell them about your project and ask them to describe a typical weekend there, etc.

Blog as you go :)

Authenticity.

In North America, the critical difference is that rice is used as a cheap alternative to barley malt. Sometimes corn. These provide cheap sugars that the yeast convert to alcohol and CO2.

This isn't beer at all to many places in the world (certainly Germany). This is just some randomly fermented crap in a can. This is Budweiser, Coors, etc.

"Real" beer contains barley, water, yeast and hops - nothing else. (OK, some pumpkin, pine needles, etc are OK for flavor,) Barley malt is expensive stuff. A 24 ounce bag of it costs about 30 bucks.

But that's what real beer - Sam Adams, Anchor Steam, Sierra Nevada - is made of.

Historical note : The introduction of rice and corn into American beer occurred during World War II. Big breweries, getting back on their feet after prohibition, had to deal with the high war-time cost of grain and a primarily female domestic customer base.

So they sought ways to make a lighter, cheaper beer to target to women. After the war, it stuck. (Perhaps because returning GI's were happy to drink anything!)

In 1997, Microsoft invested $150M in Apple , which was "90 days from bankruptcy". http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/06/02/steve-jobs-90-days/

Why'd they do it? They say it was to maintain Apple as a platform for their Office and Explorer. It may have been to keep the anti-trust wolves at bay. It may even have been personal, Gates' way of burying the hatchet with Jobs, or more malevolently, to humble Jobs by saving him.

Whatever the motive, Microsoft certainly didn't plan on reviving a monster competitor which would define and largely control new markets in portable music, smartphones, and tablets. Whose market cap would eclipse Microsoft's in 2011.

This is possibly the biggest business blunder of the 20th century.

The mother of them all : Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen. The final episode to the series M*A*S*H, 1983.

This 2.5 hour episode was the most watched thing ever on television until the 2010 superbowl. And that's probably due to increased population over 27 years.

This episode takes a very dark turn from its otherwise lighthearted (if anti-war) theme. I think the writers felt an obligation to be truthful about the nature of war.

Hawkeye has had a nervous breakdown, and is just beginning to separate fact from fantasy.

He remembers being on a bus. The bus pulls over - leery of enemy soldiers ahead. A baby cries. Hawkeye admonishes the mother to keep the baby quiet. The mother smothers the baby to death before Hawkeye realizes what's happened. Hawkeye is so messed up from the experience that he attempts surgery - without anasthesia.

Father Malcahey is rendered almost deaf by a mortar shell.

Major Winchester has taught five Koreans to play mozart, and takes great joy in conducting his makeshift orchestra. The musicians are killed in an artillery attack.

The war ends at midnight. The characters leave the camp, one by one, to return home. It's clear at times that the fourth wall has come down, and the actors are saying good bye to each other and the audience. The tears are real. "What will we do now?" is the question on everybody's mind.

In 2011 TV Guide ranked this episode as the #1 most unforgettable TV finale (May 22, 2011).

Yes - by any metric you care to invent. We are the only nation on earth that has demonstrated the capability to fight two large, simultaneous wars and still maintain forces in reserve.

Some figures :

The US spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world combined (about 40% of global spending.)

The UK has one aircraft carrier. Russia has one, France has one.

The USA has eleven.

In addition to just sheer quantity of weapons, the US is unrivalled in the world for its ability to project military power. The US has had more practice than anybody in deploying not only the weapons of war but also the supply lines of fuel, ammunition, parts, radar, toilet paper, medical supplies and on and on.

The US is really good at this war thing.

Strange when you consider that a nation with so little to fear - two huge oceans on either side, virtually untouched by war in the 20th century - became the most militarized country on earth.

The emergence of agriculture, about 10,000 BCE, is best attributed to two factors, I think : brains and climate.

Homo Sapien arrives on Earth about 200,000 years ago. But they did not achieve "behavioral modernity" until ~50,000 years ago. That is, it was only then that they began to show certain critical cognitive skills and social structures : they made art, buried their dead, engaged in religious ceremony, cared for their sick, etc. We begin to see symbols and the formation of language and abstraction.

Why the 150,000 year wait? Nobody knows really why so much time elapsed until the "Great Leap Forward". There appears to have been some change in the human brain - not in size but in structure. One theory holds that the change was sudden, perhaps due to the Toba catastrophe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory. Another theory holds that it was not sudden at all, just a series of changes that reached critical mass.

However it happened, 50,000 years ago humans tamed fire and were getting along much more capably than any of us probably would in their environment :)

But ... they were stuck in an Ice Age (cold period technically). The earth would remain quite cold until quickly snapping out of it about 12000 BCE.

Humans began to sow crops almost immediately when the warming period began.

When, um, you ask her on a second date and she says No.

You may be over-thinking this whole thing.

Without getting into the capitalist/communist debate (i''m in the middle somewhere), I think a simple answer emerges:

The cold war was fucking terrifying.

Massive nuclear stockpiles had been accumulated. An ICBM can strike its target in 30 minutes. The whole war - and human civilization - could be over in two hours.

No generation had ever faced the tangible, entirely realistic possibility that mankind could be eradicated and the planet rendered unfit for human life.

The older among us remember, as school kids, the bombing drills where you got under your desk so as not to be hit with flying glass from the blast wave. The news reports of near-launches due to misunderstanding or equipment failure. The tense stand-off of the Cuban missile crisis where our president directly threatened to nuke the Soviets.

Most people thought it was only a matter of time. Neither side would ever back down, something would go wrong at some point. Both sides adhered to the policy of "Launch on warning" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_on_warning
meaning, you launched your missiles at the first sign the enemy has launched. Or seems to have. You can't wait for the detonation because that''ll knock out your communications. You have 30 minutes to figure out if those radar blips are an attack. 29 now.

Most people I knew were sadly resigned to the belief that one or two more generations of mankind might exist, but not more.

We were scared of communists, alright. (And they were scared of us. BTW, I worked for the Pentagon during the last years of the Cold War.)

View Source!

Glancing at the FB code, it appears that a timer runs on the client which periodically pings the server for updates. (Which is the only sensible way I can think of to do it in a robust way.)

onloadRegister(function (){window.presenceNotifications =
new OriginalNotifications({"updateTime":1320341118000,"latestNotif":1320340517,"latestReadNotif":null,"updatePeriod":480000,
"cacheVersion":2,"allowDesktopNotifications":false,"notifReceivedType":"notification","wrapperID":"fbNotificationsJewel",
"contentID":"fbNotificationsList","counterInFront":1})});

That's a myth about casinos and O2 : http://www.snopes.com/luck/casino.asp.

Increasing oxygen levels by even a few percent presents a fire hazard; fires catch easier, spread faster, and otherwise inflammable material starts to burn.

Considering how most casinos allow smoking (Vegas, anyway) - cranking up the O2 is a bad idea.

It is controlled by a discordant mob.

Unlike Quora, it attempts to provide a single, definitive article on any subject. This is fine for purely factual matters; anything that might require balance between conflicting points of view is hopeless. The discordant mob will argue endlessly in Talk, and often threaten each other with administrative action.

You can't edit it. I'm serious. Pick any three topics at random : Obama, Pokemon, Arizona. Locked, locked, unlocked. 2 out of 3. This is probably a good thing, actually, given the discordant mob.

So among the mob, the threats, and the locks - a meta flaw emerges : Wikipedia is a very unrewarding place to invest your time.

Sprinter.

A couple of small nits. In C++, there is this myth that just won't die :
Pre-incrementing a primitive type is faster than post-incrementing.

So we see loops everywhere like this :
for (int i=0; i<42; ++i)
instead of
for (int i=0; i<42; i++)

The reasoning is easy to see if you consider replacing the primitive type int with a real class. In the post-increment case, both i and i++ have to briefly coexist - so we need to make a copy.

For primitive types like int , however, compilers optimized for this centuries ago.
It's one of the first and simplest things to go after when optimizing.
Try it both ways and do a binary diff. Same assembly. Not faster. Never was.

And this : Linked lists are awesome because they do insertions really fast.

Sure. Assuming God handed you a pointer to the place you need to do the insert. Otherwise you have to traverse the list, hand-over-hand, to find the damn spot where you need to insert. N/2 on average. Just as bad as block-moving half the items in a dynamic array to make room. Except in the latter case you have random access after the insert.

There are some valid occasions to use a naked linked list for actual work, but they are pretty rare (e.g., you're not worried about insertions but instead want to write functional-programming style code which recurses rather than iterates.)

Mebbe take a break from the relationship thing for a while. Being alone sucks, but after the kind of losses you've suffered, and this recent debacle, a little time to chill might be in order.

A thief keeps his money in his shoe. A liar won't believe a word you say. And a cheater can't trust anyone. It was likely him that was cheating, or about to, or being dishonest in some fundamental way. He assumes everyone else is just as sneaky, because it's the only thing he knows.

So maybe some time alone just to feel good about yourself. So good that, should this situation ever arise again with another man, you can respond, "No. I didn't. Now get out and lose my number. Douche."

The same reason all objects in the universe are rotating : It's more likely.

Of the infinitely many angular momenta an object can possess, only one of them is 0.

Similarly, walking in a straight line is highly unlikely because our bodies are never perfectly symmetrical. One eye sees clearer than the other, one ear hears better, one leg is longer or stronger, one *shoe* is tied tighter. We've all got a slight "spin" to one side or another.

So we shouldn't really expect that humans are able to walk a long straight line.

For other species, it does appear that their evolution path favored the ability to
do this (like migrating birds), so they developed sensitivities to external reference points like - perhaps - earth's magnetic field. (http://discovermagazine.com/2007/oct/birds-navigate-using-magnetic-compass-vision)

But absent some specially evolved capability, this isn't a reasonable expectation.

No. This brutal war of attrition - still America's costliest - had lain whole cities to waste and buried a good part of a generation. Lincoln wanted no part of retribution, trials, or hangings. He wanted the union to endure, and to welcome the Confederates back. He characterizes the war as God's punishment to both North and South for slavery.

From his 2nd inaugural address (a few weeks before the South surrendered - it was already clear they would lose. Lincoln knows he is speaking to the defeated):

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained... Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other...

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God... He now wills to remove, He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came...

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

For the same reason we left Emperor Hirohito untouched... There are times, in victory, when a bit of grace goes a long way to furthering the goals for which the war was fought in the first place.

There is a book which was so popular and oft-quoted it's become passe, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It's how about trends catch on. It speaks about certain types of people who can help : Mavens (people considered expert in their field with big audiences), Connectors (people who seem to know everybody), and Sale People. Worth a read.

More to the point : You need help from different kinds of people. The task is to discover who (and in the case of your service, where.)

PS : Your site design looks pretty good to me. Certainly launchable.

It's not subject to your acceptance.

We can't control who our partners speak to, and shouldn't try. Most people I know keep in contact with at least one ex-. I do.

As for my girlfriend, if she wants to speak to an ex- of hers, that is absolutely none of my business. I have no right to snoop or even ask.

It's all about trust and R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

From a 2008 interview with Fortune :

"We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products."

I think there is good reason for it. It's really about the South China Sea.

These are critical shipping lanes and fishing waters. There is also evidence of oil reserves at the ocean floor. The problem is that China has long claimed the entire South China Sea as its territorial waters.

Recently, China has begun to more aggressively assert these claims, especially in the territorial waters of the Phillipines. There have been repeated incursions here by the Chinese recently, among other disputes. Secretary Clinton met with officials in the Phillipines Wednesday (Nov 9, 2011).

China obviously can't have the South China Sea all to itself. To guard American military and economic interests in the area, it makes sense to shore up American presence in the region, which will hopefully encourage China to restrain its territorial claims.

Tech transfer?

The free market cares nothing about "need" - only "demand". It's "need" when you think people want it. It's "demand" when they actually do.

A generation ago, people suggested that Television should be flooded with mostly educational content. It was what people needed.

They disagreed and switched channels. There was no demand.

There are three basic keys to questions like this :

a) Go for a very rough estimate, an order of magnitude.
b) Like a detective, hunt around for guessable quantities that can lead to the answer. The guesses only have to be semi-sane. Nobody expects you to know things like precisely how many laptops there are in the world. It would be a little weird if you did.
c) It is good to know some basic numbers : population of earth, population of US, diameter of earth, etc.

So for this question you'd probably want to guesstimate how much time a person spends each month on his cell phone. an hour? Two? Close. Then estimate how many people have cellphones on earth - 1.5 Billion? Maybe. Now it's a straightforward algebra problem.

How many ping pong balls fit in a 747? Let's pretend the cabin is a cylinder. How wide? 25 feet? How long? Hmm ... about 6 feet per row - how many rows again on a 747? I can't remember cuz i'm scared to fly, let's say 40. So the volume of that cylinder can now be calculated. What's the volume of a ping pong ball? Well it's a sphere about yay big. Sure, the balls won't fit without wasting space, but that's nothing compare to the errors in our earlier guesses so ignore that. Now it's a geometry problem out of a high school textbook.

Don't sweat the accuracy of your initial guesses - it doesn't matter, especially if they are readily looked up. Only that they're not insane. What matters is that you are boiling down an apparently intractable problem into smaller, more tractable problems - and aren't freaked out by uncertainty.

The ping pong problem brings up a fourth point (three was just an estimate) :

d) Don't do painfully precise calculations on rough guesses.

You might be tempted to calculate how much space is wasted by packing spheres into a cylinder. This is meaningless as your estimate of the plane's volume is already off by 50% or so. The space between balls can't be more than 20%, so forget it. You may go way overboard and start fretting over the optimal packing algorithm for balls in a sphere. Huge red flag here which signals a common pitfall of some very bright people : you get bogged down in hard problems which don't actually matter.

All of this is very pertinent to the real world. "What is the database load going to be if my cool photo sharing app gets tech crunched?"

"Well, the population of the US is 300 million, maybe 2% will try it in a week. So 5 million people will upload - what - 10 images each? At typical iPhone resolution ..."

Definitely. Case law and police policy are very clear that pepper spray is not to be used on passively resisting protestors (refusing to move, locking arms, etc.)

Headwaters Forest Defense v. County of Humboldt:
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1332957.html

In addition, regional and state-wide police practice and protocol clearly suggest that using pepper spray against nonviolent protestors is excessive. The law regarding a police officer's use of force against a passive individual was sufficiently clear at the time of the events at issue in this case that the defendants cannot claim qualified immunity on the ground that they made a reasonable mistake of law. See Saucier, 121 S.Ct. at 2158.

Update: The police can also be heard preparing to fire pepperballs into the crowd a few minutes later. Please see my post Smoking gun at six minutes: UCD Police can be heard preparing to fire pepper balls into the crowd.

They don't go anywhere. They're gone.

The (awesome) domino scene in V for Vendetta (2006 movie) makes explicit mention of this theme (skip to 1:50) -

Somebody please attach this image to the question, quora's gone temporarily wonky on me :)

Skeptic : "You should just get a job!"
Entrepreneur : "Why?"
S : "So you have a stable income until you're 65, and a nice retirement fund."
E : "What then?"
S : "Whatever you want! Follow your passions!"
E : "I'm doing that now."

Wine pairs better with fine cuisine. The bitterness and fizziness of beer doesn't work well with lots of different flavors.

Wine is aged, beer is not. So a lot more effort is expended and knowledge required (is this peaking?) and a great many extra factors come into play : type of barrel, temperature, etc. I think it's safe to say that greater expertise is required to master either wine-making or wine-snobbery. This increases the perceived value.

Right.

Gotta go with Byron :

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Guys - memorize this. This will seriously get you l...iterate.

I would ask this digital native with a fresh perspective to tell me what i should learn.

I know, I know, needs improvement :)

Make like you just got back from the optometrist, they dilated your pupils, and you can't see the damn screen.

They will almost certainly say, ""Oh, i'll just talk you through it as i go."

You answer, "Well I want to refer it to later though. Email it to me? For now, let's just have a conversation, don't worry about hitting your bullet points."

I've actually done this. Twice. Never did open the emails.

First, diplomacy. Diplomacy is not about orders or threats. Diplomacy is about empathy. You send one , preferably high ranking officer to sit with them and explain :

"I have to clear this path, and I'm trying to find a way to do it which is also respectful of you guys. If you don't want to get arrested, I need you to leave. If you do want to get arrested, let's get up on our feet and walk out of here like gentleman together. I don't want to pry your hands apart. That's not respectful. Let's stand up and show everybody how peaceful protest works. Beats waiting around until you have to pee."

Here's the Austin, TX chief of police talking to protestors before arresting them.

Notice he took his hat off. That's an important bit of psychology. He is non threatening and non threatened. He sits with them. He's chill.

Result : protestor walks out, head held high, his point made. Nobody loses their job, no press conference, no investigation. Everybody lives.

The area is clear and ... how do the protesters feel about it?

That's how you move people.

Protests are unique situations that require special handling.

Oh. I got this.

Hands Held High by Lincoln Park -

Turn my mic up louder,
I got to say somethin.
...
People on the street,
they panic and start running.
....
Sick of the dark ways,
we march to the drumming.
Jump when they tell us
they want to see jumping.
Fuck that, I want to
see some fist pumping.
Like this war's really just a different brand of war
Like it doesn't cater the rich and abandon poor

Like they understand you in the back of the jet
When you can't put gas in your tank

These fuckers are laughing their way to the bank
and cashing the check ...

You like precision. Cutting down the middle, you have to guess the half-way point. Cutting corner-to-corner, it's a perfectly even split every time.

Practice sniffing out the problems you can solve. You're going to be able to do 4-6 out of 12 if you're very, very good. (If you are capable of doing 12/12 you certainly wouldn't need advice from me or anyone else :) ) So it's a good idea to sharpen your intution as to which problems you should try, and how much time you should spend deciding that.

I'm guessing this question was posed by a fellow American. The underlying question may be : Why do Americans prefer coffee to tea?

Pre-revolution colonists loved tea. In 1773 Great Britian levied the Tea Tax against the American Colonies. Rupert Baines points out that the Tax actually decreased the overall tax on tea - making smuggling less lucrative for people like John Hancock. So there seems to have been some deft propaganda about this to the advantage of a few revolutionaries. In any case, all hell broke loose.

In addition to the Boston Tea Party, an organized effort ensued to stop drinking tea altogether and switch to coffee. From Wikipedia :

In 1773, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife stating, "Tea must be universally renounced and I must be weaned, and the sooner the better." Thus began the American shift from tea to coffee. In a concentrated boycott, the housewives of Falmouth, Massachusetts publicly united, vowing to serve only coffee in their homes. This inspired other households throughout the colonies, both in the north and south, to do the same.

Soon it was seen as a betrayal of the colonies to drink or serve tea. In 3 years, the colonies were at war with Great Britain. The switch to coffee took permanent hold in American culture.

Leading us to pose questions like this :)

Python : for clarity of syntax, 'batteries included' set of libraries, elegance, consistency, lack of historical kludgery, and existence of capable web frameworks should you want to build out a serious product.

In America anyway,

There was great disillusionment when MLK and RFK were assassinated. The idealism of the 60's started to sink into sad resignation.

The celebratory hedonism of the flower children morphed into senseless self-destruction (RIP John Belushi, Jim Morrison, etc etc.)

Nixon got elected and turned out to be a paranoid mini-despot. The Watergate scandal was referred to by his successor (whom he appointed) as "our long national nightmare."

The OPEC oil embargo sent "oil shocks" through our economy for years creating "stagflation" - inflation without economic growth.

We lost our first war in Vietnam. We watched helplessly as saigon fell, and pushed helicopters off an aircraft carrier to make room for a panicked evacuation.

The Cold War reached its most dangerous apex. A lot of folks expected to be nuked any day.

And worse : Disco. Christ.

The zeitgeist was captured well in the song American Pie. It was really about the death of Buddy Holly, but many folks felt it spoke to this general feeling of defeat and hopelessness :

A long long time ago
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step

...

Now, for ten years we've been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rolling stone
But that's not how it used to be
...
Helter skelter in a summer swelter
The birds flew off with a fallout shelter
Eight miles high and falling fast
...
Oh, and there we were all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again
...
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died .

Little did anyone know what great things were quietly stirring in labs and garages. The microcomputer. The internet. That the Cold War wouldn't last forever and the missiles wouldn't go off.

It happened in the last 15 years.

In the developed world, we are never lost (GPS) and never out of touch with everyone we know.

Start small.

You're happy for a stray puppy when it finds a home, yes?

Work up from there :)

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world. A dying man divulges the location of hidden treasure, setting off a (mad) chase by a horde of (mad) people to find it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057193/plotsummary

It would be great to hear directly from such an officer.

I visited OccupyBoston last friday for the first time. I spoke to an officer for about 5 minutes. Here's how it went.

The police presence around boston is pretty restrained. Cops stood in pairs on all four sides to total just 8. After hanging around "Tent City" for an hour I approached one. He was African-American, about 35, on the big side.

I was a little scared to approach him, coming out of the camp. I came no closer than 6 feet and just looked at him. He beamed a disarming smile. I closed the distance and asked, "So how is this detail for you?"

"It's pretty good, really. Not much to do. The kids are pretty nice."

I said, "I am totally blown away at how organized it is."

He smirked, "You think it's organized?"

"They are trying to keep things under control. What I worry about is you have this open camp, serving free food to anybody and providing shelter. So you got some drug addicts and drug dealers coming in, mixing up with the protestors."

"There's also a couple people being verbally aggressive with us, This is where alcohol usually comes in. Other protestors usually step in and stop them. I mean, I'm used to getting yelled at."

"They have their own sort of security force they've put together. Some who have been bouncers at bars or ex-military. When there's an incident, we let them handle it. They call us over if they need us. It's a lot like we're supervising them. It's tense, you have to watch without interfering, but be ready to jump in if things go wrong. We've been asked in a couple of times."

I asked him, "Do you think they should clear the camp?"

"Yea, I don't think it's good for their cause anymore. Because of the element it attracts, not because of the protestors. If something happens, it's just going to hurt them."

I was about to ask how he would feel if he had to be part of a force which would finally clear out the protesters (they have a restraining order which expires on Dec 1st), but heard "Mic check! Mic check!" and looked over my shoulder.

I looked back at him and he nodded toward the direction of the announcement. I couldn't tell if he thought I wanted to go over or was suggesting that I do. "It's OK. Nice talking to you."

The officer I spoke to is on the right. For some reason, taking a direct picture didn't feel like the right thing to.

The camp.

Wayne - a vet who was unofficially in charge of the camps 'Safety' team. (Nobody is actually in charge of anything, part of occupy's ethos.) He walked by the officer I spoke to at one point, patted him on the shoulder and said hello.

Inability wrapped in belligerence.

Many times I've seen people with very little understanding or experience in a field deflect counterarguments with threats, yelling - intimidation basically.

Smart people bail. Timid sychophants - even less capable - gather 'round.

Instead of solving real problems, the purpose of the group becomes to appease the fragile ego of the belligerent. The ship goes down because nobody wants to mention the danger of icebergs.

It may have its origins as a verb meaning "to throw somebody out", as in "bouncer."

"'The Bouncer' is merely the English 'chucker out'. When liberty verges on license and gaiety on wanton delirium, the Bouncer selects the gayest of the gay, and - bounces him!"

London Daily News, Thursday 26 July 1883

Lisp : To iterate is human; to recurse is divine.

As Aditya Sengupta indicated, he got screwed over by David Sarnoff, head of RCA. Sarnoff aligned the entire broadcast industry to ignore his patents and force him into expensive legal battles to in an attempt to enforce the patents.
Engineers spent a lot of time to "work around Farnsworth", making trivial modifications of his design to confuse juries. A great movie about it was made by PBS :

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/technology/bigdream/abprogram.html

Hitler plans burning man :

It is almost always the first transcendental number people encounter. So, not only is there no pattern at all to its decimal expansion (like square root of 2), it's not the root of any polynomial (unlike square root two.)

It appears everywhere in physics and geometry. Circles appear in nature because of their symmetry and the property that they maximize the enclosed area.

I think it is seductive to people that such a simple figure as a circle could yield such an elusive quantity.

Perhaps the real question is : Why? ;)

The "fish out of water" theme is one of my favorites.

Into the wild : A college graduate who can't tolerate the modern world goes to live in the woods in Alaska.

The graduate :
Another college graduate who finds upper middle class life banal and meeaningless, and can't seem to find anything that matters (don't die without seeing this.)

The Terminal :

A man who can't speak English gets stuck in an American airport. His government was just overthrown and he is nation-less. He is unable to enter the US and unable to go back home. He can't understand what is happening and gets virtually no help from anybody.

Gypsy 83 :
A couple of goth kids from the midwest ditch everything and hit the road ...

The elephant man: (which i still can't bear to watch all the way through)

Anything with an alien in human form naturally fits into this. My favorites -

Starman

KPAX:

Somebody, hopefully they'll make this book into a movie : Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein.

It is as if somebody has blind folded you, taken you by the hand, and walked you down a complex path to get somewhere.

If you pay attention, you can memorize the number of steps and where to turn.

But you don't see the landscape - the trees and houses you're avoiding, the hill you're getting around.

You know how to get there, but have no sense of all of what the path is through.

Perhaps not, for three reasons.

Reason 1 : There was no internet.
The album cover was a very big deal. It was the visual part of the artist's expression. You'd scrutinize every square inch of the album cover as you listened. You'd use it to clean your ... whoa - mom, that's not mine. Holding it for a friend.

Today this doesn't matter because you just hit the band's website.

Reason 2 : There was no internet.
As Dave Land said, there was scarcity. This was really the only way to listen to a quality recording. Tape and FM really didn't sound good. If it was a rare LP you'd have to try to find it. Scour record stores. Make new friends. Who stash weed in your room. Serious, mom.

There were also girls (!?!) at the record store. You could even tell the ones that liked the same music you do.

There are still avid LP collectors today, but they don't have to hunt and hope. They just go online and find it. Money talks.

Reason 3 : There was no internet.

If it didn't come on the radio, and you didn't have it on vinyl - you weren't gonna hear it. At all. You couldn't pull it up on youtube or pirate it. It had value.

CDs : No cover, no value, no friends, no hunt, no weed, no girls. This is progress?

This is probably the single most mis-invoked bit of philopsophy in popular culture.

As Karl Mamer and others have stated a little differently, Occam's razor is not a principle. It is simply advice.

It is best summarized in the phrase, "Do not multiply entities [or assumptions] beyond necessity." (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). Well, obviously you don't want to make unnecessary assumptions. Given that an extra assumption introduces an additional 'contingency' or possibility of being false, introducing one unnecessarily is obviously a bad idea. This doesn't really bear pointing out, philosophically.

It's really a caution about human psychology. We are an imaginative species.
Occams's razor is simply a reminder not to make a bunch of crazy shit up.

For illustration, let's turn to South Park. Regarding a 9/11 Conspiracy Theory:

George W. Bush: Yes, quite simple to pull off really, all I had to do was have explosives planted in the base of the towers, then on 9/11 we pretended like 4 planes were being hijacked when really we just rerouted them to Pennsylvania (state), then flew 2 military jets into the World Trade Center filled with more explosives, then shot all the witnesses of flight 93 with an F-15 after blowing up The Pentagon with a cruise missile. It was only the world's most intricate and flawlessly executed plan, ever, ever.

Kyle: Really?!

[...]

Kyle: Who's really responsible for 9/11?

Stan: Who do ya think? Some pissed off Muslims.

If you really have evidence for all the assumptions in Bush's version, Occam is cool with that. Occam's razor is just cautioning you about the tendency to think that way without evidence.

Frequently in the course of debate, Occam's razor is invoked to discard a complex theory in favor of a simple one. The fact is, simple explanations have to be tossed out all the time.

Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics was simple. Relativity (physics) is dizzyingly complex by comparison. But Isaac Newton was wrong.

This caused Albert Einstein (physicist) to give a rebuke to Occam's Razor: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Occam's razor should never be invoked during a debate. If a person has made an unnecessary and indefensible assumption, attack the assumption itself.

If you can't, you should probably hear them out.

"Look, at the end of the day, apples to apples, flying at 30,000 feet, this is a paper company. And I don't want to get lost in the weeds or into a beauty contest. Convergence, viral marketing, we're going guerilla. We're taking it to the streets, while keeping an eye on the street - Wall Street. I don't want to reinvent the wheel here. In other words, it is what it is."

- Ryan

Hey.

It sounds like you're depressed and anxious, which is the most commonly heard psychiatric complaint. A forum like Quora might get you some useful feedback, but can I make a suggestion?

Print out your question. You say it helps to talk to the therapist, but you only get to do that once a month. That's not very much.

I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like the treatment you're getting is not the right frequency and possibly not the right type. Depression and anxiety are among the most treatable issues, but it's got to be the right treatment for you.

Maybe once or twice a week. Something more 'immersive'. Maybe some medication. Glad you're not resorting to booze, that'll mess you up even worse.

My suggestion is to go around with that print-out to various mental health professionals, show it to them, and see if you can't work out some treatment which is effective for you. Shop around.

If money is tight, you may be able to find free support groups and such.

Kind of like a toothache, issues like this are only really painful when they don't get the right professional attention.

Friendster.

Social networking with real names in 2002. They got 3 million users in the first few months, but were sunk by technical and management issues. This cleared a path for MySpace and facebook.

See

What were the key mistakes that Friendster made?

and

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html

In high school, I told my gullible chemistry lab partner that he needs to sign out a "fallopian tube" from the teacher. They're expensive so the school needs to keep track of them ... he bit ...

In my first job for the DoD, a coworker had to call a French company for some reason or other. He had heard the French really appreciate it if you ask them in French to speak English. Since I had taken french, I offered to help him out, and taught him to say, "Bonjour. Je m'appelle Dan Gross. Je travaille aux etats unis et il y'a une vache verte dans mes pantalons." (Hello, my name is Dan Gross, I work in the United States and there is a green cow in my pants.)

I siphoned out half my neighbor's above-ground swimming pool with a garden hose.

"I'm sending you a big bill."

In addition to the excellent suggestions others have made, put stickers of this on your doors and windows :

(feel free to print out)

Also, older people vote :

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/age-turnout-and-voteshtml.php?nr=1

Social Security and Medicare have been called the Third Rail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail) of American politics. Touch it and die.

This may be a bit dated, but I worked as a software engineer in 1990-1996 for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, at the very end of the Cold War. This facility originated developing sonar systems for submarines, but by the time I got there it had evolved into doing wargame simulations. Yea, just like the movie - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

I was lucky to be working through a contractor. The military tends to contract out its important work. Impressively, the military recognizes that it is a huge, inefficient bureaucracy and real work is best left to contractors.

These are not short-term contracts. Contractors are supposed to compete for bids, but really the game is rigged. The contract is generally written up so specifically that only one company can bid on it, and the status quo is maintained. So this was a long-term, stable position. Just a different color badge.

You get to work on insanely exotic hardware. Supercomputers, flight simulators, etc. DoD thinks nothing of dropping 10 million on stuff just to try it out.

There is a great deal of creative freedom - more so in the private sector. The trick is to come up with ideas and sell them to a COTR (Contracting Officer's Technical Representative). These are the people who sign off on the contracts.
You can invent your own job.

(If you work for the military, and not for a contractor, you are likely to end up being a COTR and doing paperwork rather than real engineering.)

There is a long time to get your work done. Deliverables are typically made annually. You've basically got a year to put something together. There is a lot of opportunity to learn new stuff, not much pressure.

There is a stunning amount of bullshit coming down from DoD. Pointy haired bosses hurling around TLA's and making powerpoint presentations to attract funding from the Pentagon. I was actually told to write a program to burn up Cray Supercomputer time, so that the guy who bought the computer didn't look like a dolt for wasting money.

Disclaimer : This is my own personal experience, somewhat dated, and I'm sure there is great engineering work being done by non-contractors. This was just my experience.

Contact by Carl Sagan features an alien message in the decimal expansion of Pi. (don't ask me how they got it in there ;) )

Mu.

Not sure what you mean by strange, but around 5800 BC Mount Etna in Sicily appears to have blown ski-high, creating a debris avalanche and a mega-tsunami - http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027790.shtml

There is some speculation that this created the legend of Atlantis.

Awesome, awesome trailer (and music) for Battle LA :

Movie is "loud, ugly and stupid" (Ebert.) I would seriously rather watch the trailer 60 times in succession that watch that stink bomb.

See Are we just looking back in time when we gaze into space?

Stephen King has stated that Kubrick didn't do justice to what King felt were the most important aspects of the book : The main character's struggle with alcoholism, the dissolution of the American family (or at least this one), and the malevolence of the hotel itself (rather than the people/ghosts in it.)

Some of this may be personal for King. Like the main character, King was a writer with a serious alcohol and cocaine problem who confessed suppressing "brutal urges" toward his daughter. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1178151/Stephen-Kings-Real-Horror-Story-How-novelists-addiction-drink-drugs-nearly-killed-him.html The book is about a good man turned bad by alcoholism; an alcoholism exploited by an unseen evil force.

The movie is about a jerk who just gets worse.

Pseudo-code is a means to express an algorithm.

It's a somewhat fine distinction. Pseudo-code is to an algorithm as a painting of a tree is to an actual tree.

As a straight person with a gay cousin and many gay friends, I would feel a little bit less like :

A white person in Alabama in 1910, walking around with the gnawing sense that by participating in this society I am complicitous in its bigotry.

Yes, it can also make it harder to tow ;)

See this house?

That's in my home town of Norwich, Connecticut. It is the birthplace of a Revolutionary War General. He was a brilliant and fearless tactician, among his many accomplishments was the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, helping to win the Battle of Saratoga (where he got injured), and too many others to mention.

What's this crappy ranch house doing there? Where's the statue, why wasn't the house preserved (or at least rebuilt) in it's original form?

You probably guessed it - this is the birthplace of non other than Benedict Arnold.

After getting into some political disputes with other colonists, he defected to the British. Secretly at first. He got himself appointed to West Point so that he could surrender it to the British (unsuccessfully). It was named Fort Arnold at the time, after him.

Next the weasel joined the British Forces openly. He led the attack against New London and Groton, two seaport towns 12 miles south of Norwich. These two towns were essentially part of Norwich; connected by the Thames River and a good road, Norwich had daily business with New London and Groton. He attacked his own neighbors, the very people he grew up with. Much of New London was burnt down.

After the war, the colonists welcomed British to come visit and even settle in America. But not this jackass. He would have been shot on sight.

When I grew up there, there was no way to find this place if you didn't know exactly where to look. His name appeared nowhere, at all. Folklore had it that it brought bad luck to say his name.

(A small plaque has since been put there.)

Ah schadenfreude ...

Overnight, a documentary about Troy Duffy, writer and director of the Boondock Saints.

This guy hit the script-writer's jackpot while working at a bar. Miramax offered 15 million to make the movie, let him direct it, give him final say in casting, final cut, let his band do the soundtrack AND to buy the bar where he worked and split it with him.

Duffy turns out to be an abusive, alcoholic ass-clown. Loses everything. When Boondock becomes a cult hit on DVD, he gets none of that money. Here’s a trailer :

Harold Camping, the dipshit who convinced all those people the end was indeed nigh ...

One simple way to attract facebook interaction is to pose a question. It can be about anything, really. (I am not referring to their polling thingie, just a regular old question.)

Another is to say something controversial (without trolling.)

A controversial question combines the two.

They key is this : You're not trying to get them to listen to you. You're trying to get them to talk to you.

Provoke them, strike a nerve, make them choose sides. Sit back and let them go at it with each other. Your EdgeRank (facebook ranking) will climb as a result.

It's a new way of thinking, from the old days when organizations were an information pump. The flow has reversed.

The king can't move as far, it can't check your opponent, and it can't be sacrificed.

What Andrey Khavryuchenko said - it's all about availability of developers, both now and in the future (if you intend to grow.)

If you are really worried about maximizing developer availability in the future (like if your current dev takes off), it makes sense to go with the most popular languages.

This would be Ruby On Rails or even PHP. See Why is Django not as popular as Ruby on Rails?

Otherwise just let the dev work in whatever s/he wants.

Does the Higgs Boson exist?

We may actually get an answer to this in eight days (12/12/11) , thanks to data gathered from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The Higgs Boson is sometimes called "The God particle." It is the missing piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics which attempts to unify the four forces of nature : the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity.

Physicists the world over are holding their breath for what could be the biggest news in science in 50 years. Thanks to Jay Wacker for alerting Quora to this : Higgs Boson: Higgs Update Coming...

Purchase, rather than lease your Gulf Stream Jet.

Leasing can be just as expensive as outright ownership, as you still incur the cost of maintenance, insurance, pilot salary, hangar space, etc.

When you purchase outright, the aircraft is yours to sell when you wish to upgrade to the next model that rolls out. Unlike an automobile, these aircraft tend to hold their value over time.

Don't fall for the slick lease-pitch from your local jet dealer.

You should hire based on ability, not gender.

You should probably reflect on what prejudices are lurking in your mind which led to such a question. Prejudice is not only unfair to prospective employees, it puts you at a competitive disadvantage because you might miss talent.

You might even miss a superstar like Rebekah Cox, who designed Quora and big chunks of facebook. http://www.fastcompany.com/most-creative-people/2011/rebekah-cox-quora

Seriously. Get a grip. My bearded friend here perhaps puts it more succinctly :

PowerPoint.

"Floats on." ;)

Yes. Like most important questions, this has been addressed in south park : http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/153492/a-god-among-sea-men

I think what attracts engineers to start-ups is the freedom to create something important and also to own a big piece of that thing - in that order.

The potential of a big payout is a kind of joyful side effect. They are really in it to put a dent in the universe, but they also don't want to make somebody else rich and not themselves should it take off.

So equity is more important, and comes second to creative freedom without a lot of bullshit impediments. (PS : Have a good answer for when they ask about Equity Dilution, developers are becoming hip to the trick of giving them a 20% stake which evaporates by sleight of hand ...)

"S/he's a good person to have around."

An amateur break-in (with flashlights blazing). A piece of scotch tape discovered by a security guard. A cover-up. An enemies list. 18 minutes of blanked tape. An American president resigns in disgrace.

Three great movies were made about the fall of Nixon in the Watergate scandal. Mircea Goia mentioned two, All The President's Men (about the two reporters who broke the story) and Frost/Nixon (about the interviewer who got Nixon to admit to breaking the law on camera.) Both are fantastic and I'd like to add a third from the POV of the president himself - visually stunning, with brilliant acting by Anthony Hopkins - simply titled

Nixon:
Streaming (for now) on YouTube:

I expect that will come down eventually, here's the trailer:

Aside from the rumour that 'rosebud' refers to William Randolph Hearst's pet name for his mistress' clitoris (c'mon, we're grownups, we can say it!), it was literally the name printed on Kane's childhood sled :

Metaphorically, it refers to the life Kane left behind at this pivotal moment (when he's holding 'Rosebud'). Wealth has suddenly been discovered in his family and he is sent away from his home to start a new life of wealth and power.

His new fortune has a ruinous effect on him. He becomes corrupted, morally bankrupt, he dies friendless and alone, surrounded by a staggering mass of meaningless possessions.

His dying word, "Rosebud", is an expression of regret for the turn his life took when he gave up his sled, his family, his values. It is a yearning for the meaning and potential forever lost in this moment.

Spoiler alert :

Ghost World is an amazing coming of age story of two high school girls. It is fun to watch, biting, perceptive and deftly avoids cheap sentimentality.

There is also a parting paranormal touch in the last scene. Earlier in the movie, we are introduced to this apparently crazy old guy who sits at a bus stop - where the bus no longer comes. He never seems to learn and is always there. Dressed, it seems, as if for a special occasion :

One girl tells him, "The bus doesn't come here any more." He responds quite firmly, "You don't know what you're talking about."

There is a bus - but it's no ordinary bus. As the plot develops, the girl on the left decides to stay in her home town, get a job and an apartment. The girl on the right ... can't bring herself to do that. She realizes her life lies beyond this suburban town. Only then does she sit on that bench. And the bus comes for her.

It's a bus that comes when you are truly ready to leave.

This scene is all the more poignant because there isn't a trace of anything other-wordly in the rest of the movie.

(This must-see film launched the career of Scarlett Johannsen)

geany is my favorite editor; it's fairly lightweight but has good support for lots of different programming/mark-up languages. Auto collapsing blocks comes in handy especially when dealing w/ nested divs ...

No.

It has to be per game (FB doesn't aggregrate apps by publisher; in fact any attempt to do so could be easily circumvented - unless FB build a walled garden.) Fortunately, Zinga doesn't make that many and I blocked them long ago. Occasionally a new one pops up, but having to block it is infinitely preferable to an Apple-esque walled garden approach.)

In addition to Steve Denton's answer, the constancy of the speed of light had been confirmed by repeated experiments beginning in 1887 in the Michelson-Morley experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment. This was a clever setup using mirrors to form an interferometer. The speed of light was then measured parallel to the spin of the earth, in both directions (towards dawn and sunset.) If light were travelling at a constant speed through the aether, the two measurements should have been different.

No such difference was ever found, even though the interferometer was sensitive enough to detect it.

This was the real smoking gun that inspired Einstein to attempt a radical remodelling of space and time.

If this is all you want, a semantic engine may be overkill.

Questions usually end in a question mark :)

If you want to catch tweets where the question mark has been omitted, another reasonable heuristic is that that first word is from this list : "What, How, Why, Where, , Does, Do , Should, When, Am, Is, Are, Can, Could, Will, Might".

This shd be < an hour of coding for any developer. I'll gladly do it for $5,000 :)

So they can still use the (capacitive) touch screen on their smartphone.

Yes - fire burns at a snail's pace without gravity (thanks to Pete Van der Goore, see ... http://www.space.com/13766-international-space-station-flex-fire-research.html).

In the presence of gravity, the hot gas produced by combustion is less dense, so it rises up and fresh air rushes in from beneath. This brings in a constant stream of oxygen to feed the fire. In zero gravity the fire gets a comparative trickle of oxygen through molecular diffusion.

The reason a flame leans toward your finger may be due to the Bernoulli Effect.

The God-awful Eastern Front, the most costly conflict in human history.

Two gargantuan military powers (each with little regard for loss of life on either side) just went at it with everything they had. Soviet losses ~ 10 million, German losses ~ 5 million.

Each side had tens of thousands of tanks and aircraft. Arguably the battle turned only on German tactical errors (especially Hitler's refusal to allow tactical retreat), some bad luck with weather, and code breaking.

It's complicated.

I think it began as a clumsy attempt at acceptance on the part of straight people. 'Lifestyle' is a neutral word - not a big deal. We all have a right to our lifestyle, right? I'm referring here to the early 70's, when people were experimenting with different sorts of 'lifestyles' (open marriages, communal living, etc.)

I really think people meant well by it, and didn't realize they were smuggling in the assumption that sexual orientation is a matter of choice.

The term has since been co-opted by bigots. The bigot first wants to deny that homosexuality is a natural, inborn trait in many people - to trivialize orientation as a choice. Once they've done that, they can argue with the choice and (especially tragic in the case of many teens) attempt to reverse it.

This guy :

(Burt Ward) wanted to do this TV show ...

... so he turned down an offer for the leading role in this little indie film :

(years are approximate cuz I don't wanna think that hard.)

1982-ish Basic: Apple II, Timex Sinclair, PDP 1170.

1983-ish 6502 Assembly, Z80 assembly, FORTRAN, Pascal

1984-ish Forth (which was really cool, cuz it ran fast due to its reverse-polish nature)

1990 : Lisp (and Star-LISP).

1991 : C

1992 : I wrote my own ! Called Lexicon, a domain-specific language for wargames written for the dept of offense.

1993 : C++

and then the Web happened, and the usual zoo of web languages came after.

From personal experience,

You may live in the wrong place now.

When I was young, I was surrounded by other people with my interests due to school. There was an automatic selection/grouping mechanism at work which surrounded me with people I could connect with.

Then I got older and lost that.
At first, I lived in a boring small town in the country. My hometown. I was lonely.
Then I moved to the city. It was too compressed, too young and transient (Boston.) Despite being surrounded by people, I was lonely.
Then I moved to the north shore of Boston - Salem. Not so crowded. I met my kind of people - creative types - artists, musicians, people my age, people not my age.
I was no longer lonely.

Keep looking, I'd say.

I used to wonder,

Why doesn't somebody do something about it?

Then I realized :

I am somebody.

"You won't believe the phones."

It's my understanding the Special Relativity was generally accepted within 15-20 years, but General Relativity was much more mathematically abstract and really didn't become universally accepted by mainstream physicists until the discovery of such exotic objects as quasars and black holes in the 1960's. It was also in this decade that the mathematics was rendered more tractable and electronic computers were of assistance. I'll try to return with sources ...

Pi in binary (any three symbols for dot, '1' and '0') should be easy to figure out ...

11.001001000011111101101010

Each tab in Chrome runs as a separate process - this is the key difference between Chrome and other browsers. This makes Chrome more robust (one page can't bring the browser down) but it can also eat up more RAM.

You can tell Chrome to launch in a single process if you want, see http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-cool-tricks-to-put-some-more-sheen-on-google-chrome/

Clowns.

The centers of innovation - Silicon Valley, Boston, MA, etc., can be very expensive places to live.

Young entrepreneurs would benefit greatly by having "office crashpads" to have a roof over their heads and a place to work. Some basic services like Internet service and health care.

I think there is some youthful rebellion against both the draconian control of Apple and the fragmentation/glitchiness of Android.

But this won't make youth turn to Windows. MS doesn't know how to talk to young people. I mean - look at the name. Windows doesn't mean anything. It's this genericized, decades-old term that just fades into beige. It's not even clear that it's a proper noun in conversation until some context falls into place.

This is the work of MBA's trying to stay "on brand" who don't get the youth culture. Or any culture. A kid who buys this has to say, "it's running Windows - not like the PC but a phone version." If you can't even come up with a name ... it's like showing up to a rave in a suit and tie. Hopeless.

"Oh! But the outlook integration!" Suit and tie.

Metro PC would have been a great name and indicated it works nice with your PC. Or X-Phone. Anything. Else.

The kicker of it is, Mango is a great OS. It's possibly the best one out there right now. It has a fluid, well thought out social-centric design, really facile tiling, reviewers love it. Nobody cares.

Am I really saying a name can kill a great product? I guess I am. I don't see how MS can talk young people into anything when they can't even start the conversation.

The question you intend to ask is perhaps, "Why do people often
ask the wrong question?" (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

As Yishan Wong points out, the question is usually a near-miss (unless the question is trivial.)

In fact, science and philosophy can be seen as the practice of refining questions.

He never tried, as far as I know.

There was a common joke, in Nazi Germany—which had to be whispered into a trusted friend's ear because it would get you shot—"The ideal German should be as blonde as Hitler, as tall as Goebbels, as slim as Goering and as chaste as Roehm."

Hitler was certainly no ubermensch. Terrible teeth, drooping shoulders, explosive, vain and effeminate (according to Carl Jung.) Jung posited that it was precisely Hitler's rather pathetic appearance that captured the imagination of the German people.

His adoration of Nordic ideals did not appear self-serving. His fiery oration combined with his weak appearance subliminally mirrored Germany itself: pathetic, humiliated, enraged, full of hidden power.

Disclosure : German/Jewish descent here, many of my ancestral relatives got trapped in Germany, were imprisoned in Theresienstadt and sent to death camps in the east. I've been able to track down about 50 of them.

Answer : No. That war was horrible. For Jews, for Russians, for Japanese, for Germans, for millions. It was a wounding of all humanity.

A wound needs to heal.

Sure, we hunt down the most culpable. We do our best to return art, gold and other property. But we can never set it right.

We can, however, heal. To heal is to outlive the wound.

Yes. Ethics.

It's not a cool move. There's so many other things to do, why turn around and slap the company that hired and trusted you?

If you need a better reason than Karma, it damages your reputation. The people at your present company will move on some day, and join your professional network. You don't want the reputation as a person who's cut-throat.

Nobody is going to steal your idea. You're lucky if they listen to your idea for more than five seconds.

The best (and only) way to start is build a prototype.

If you can't do that, find someone to do it for you.
Failing that, you're dead. Good ideas get built.

The bartender says, "Sorry. We don't serve neutrinos faster than light here."

A neutrino walks into a bar.

The kids are alright.

The media interest in this sort of thing is kinda creepy.

Leave it alone, I say.

A good candidate is the coming collision with Peak Oil.

We are at or near the maximum rate we can pump oil out of the earth, no matter how much more we drill. All the major reserves have been located (which is the reason we're starting to drill in weird places like a mile below sea level in the Gulf of Mexico - sorry, BP.)

At current consumption rates, we're totally out of oil in 50-100 years. But we'll run short of it long before then.

So a number of things can happen, all of them expensive on a WWII scale.

Oil dependent countries may go to war (like the USA and China.)

Industrial society may be massively re-engineered to make it less oil dependent - especially farming and personal transportation. For instance, biodiverse, local farmlands that aren't reliant on fertilizer or presticides, a return to a village structure where walking is the primary mode of transportation.

We may make up the difference by building 10's of thousands of nuclear generators.

We may opt for a sharp drop in global population.

We may do nothing and the system will crash, causing famine, war, and the general collapse of industrial civilization.

Mark the mistakes. Spend some time reflecting on what went wrong. Wrong partners? Too slow to execute? Be especially hard on yourself, what bad moves did you make.

Start a new one based on your hard-won wisdom.

Don't be discouraged. Bill Gates' first product was some traffic counting piece of crap. Zuck turned down a million bucks for a pandora-like music player, it flopped, and the million dollar offer disappeared. Most success stories have their origins in failure.

Dude, she's beautiful and one of the great talents of her generation.

If Fox doesn't say it, nobody will.

Stocks haven't seen growth in 11 years. I'd put it there.

"if a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass a-hoppin" ... Raising Arizona.

To add to Cynthia's answer, you should also be aware of the (still rather newish) Provisional Patent Application available in the US.

This allows you to write a technical white paper on your own, submit it, and you are given a year to file the actual patent application. It costs about $200 and was introduced so that inventors could protect their ideas while they are in the process of raising to funds so they can afford a patent attorney.

There are some pitfalls here, you need to make sure your 'claims' are properly defined in the provisional application. It's best to at least to a consult with an attorney to make sure the provisional is adequate.

He united technology with beauty on a global scale.

Going back a ways, Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love. This belongs on your bucket-list.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062376/

The first African-American actor to become a household name as the star of films both successful and critically acclaimed. Many African-American actors in the next generation credit him as their inspiration.

A pixel just went out on the in-flight screen I was watching, making it impossible for me to enjoy the documentary on starvation in central Africa.

Just great.

I have no personal experience with this, so this is just an addendum to more personally informed answers like Jenn Cab's. (Though I was partially blinded for a year as a child.)

You may also want to get in contact with http://www.worldaccessfortheblind.org.
This is the work of Daniel Kish, who dedicates himself to using sound to replace vision (echolocation.) He is working on new ways to teach this skill and new technologies to enable it.

I have offered up free programming services to this organization and encourage other Quora techies to do the same.,

"Sorry to tell you but ..."

Simple.

In French, the word "facile" seems perfect. It directly translates as "easy", but it has nuance of effective structure (as in facility).

Check anxiety.

Sphere.

Definitely the epic answer Michael Wolfe gave to Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality?.

"No, shut up."

What is so great about this answer is it is as funny as it is true. It also does something that only the very best answers do : rise above the question to address a deeper truth. (In this case, it points out the tendency people have to take a useful, simple idea and bury it under heaps of 'improvements.')

Oh boy. I am breaking my own rule of never arguing with Randians.

It doesn't exist. There really is no coherent expression of her philosophy anywhere. Rand rambles, utters inanities like "existence exists", quotes her own fictional characters, and is really just way over her head as a political philosopher.

Philosophies of 'rational self interest' are competently laid out by many other thinkers.
Rand's failure to pull herself together aside, we can summarize her views "The Individual good should trump the Collective good in all circumstances."
It is a very seductive viewpoint because it so clean. Nobody owes anybody anything, people are entitled to whatever they make, and if your house burns down it's not my problem. The problem is,
It's too clean. When agents acting in their rational self-interest begin to interact with each other, something very unexpected happens. They screw themselves over. Not each other - themselves. Game theorists and economists point to the The Prisoner's Dilemma :

I'll just try to summarize it : The Prisoner's Dilemma shows that there are situations that force us to be Collectivists, that is - the individual is better off acting against his interest locally in pursuit of some greater global collective payoff. If this seems like nonsense - it should, it's very counterintuitive. It's really worth studying the The Prisoner's Dilemma.
I'll take a stab at a simple example. 50 people live on a island. On the island is a fresh water spring, but there is a 3 ton rock on top of it. If the rock could be removed, everybody would have fresh water to drink.
Nobody can move it alone, it takes dozens of people tugging with a rope. Your individual contribution won't make a difference - one person less and the rock still moves. It is not in your rational self interest to help.
"Ah hah!", says the Objectivist, "But we're smarter than that! We simply all agree beforehand, we'll all pull the rock and we all get the water. Thus an agreement is in force which compels us to pull, making it a rational choice."

Yup. Such agreements are called Governments. They re-allocate resources against people's self-interest in pursuit of big goals like reservoirs, roads, dams, defense.

The fact is, the Individual Good cannot be untangled from the Collective Good.While the extremes - pure capitalism on one end of the spectrum and pure communism on the other - can be very seductive because they are so pure, reality rejects this purity.
The result is we are always (imperfectly) balancing the Individual and the Collective good. This is the reason every economy on earth is really a mixed economy somewhere on that spectrum. The most successful are likely close to a good balance.
Rand wrote, "Either individual rights are recognized in a society, or they are not recognized. They cannot be half-recognized."
Actually we are compelled to half-recognize them in a world with big rocks to move.

The key question is - is he really not getting things done?

You say he knows how to do and build everything, which hints that he has indeed built stuff.
Is he simply working in a way which looks inefficient, but is actually the guy out producing other engineers?
That happens a lot. Some really good technical people have a kind of ADHD-ish tendency to switch focus. It looks like goofing off. It often is.
So you see him browsing reddit, and there's important work to be done. And of course, you think : The work isn't done yet because the guy can't focus.

But if you look deeper, you may realize that nobody else can do this task because this guy is incredibly good when he's "on". He can do in two hours what other engineers fail to accomplish in two weeks.

And you see him browsing reddit and desperately want to tighten that screw.

For people like this (call them Intermittent Superheros), it's important to realize they work in super-productive bursts. Any attempt to interfere with their self-scheduling will convert them to Mere Mortals. The goofing off is actually a preparation for hyper-focus.

It can be unnerving to watch. So it's best not to watch them.

Is the afternoon sun coming through a window? You may have the common trait of sneezing in the presence of sunlight - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex

I think this is one of those dichotomous questions that needs to be unasked; culture and media follow each other in a reinforcing cycle where it's impossible to untangle cause and effect.

You can drown in 20 seconds. Somebody holds somebody's head underwater - you can hold your breath while they 'drown', 2 or 3 times over.A

A car that goes off a cliff will always explode. It's actually gas vapor that's explosive - you can put out a match in liquid gasoline. If the tank is nearly empty you might get a small explosion, or you might get a big explosion *later* when the gas has leaked and is evaporating.

The only way an explosive shell can hurt you is if it blows you into the air. Nobody is ever taken out by shrapnel from an explosion 20 feet away (the way they are actually designed to work.)

Waterfall development : A big schedule is pulled out of thin air and thrown over the wall at developers. Middle managers break it up into chunks and pass it down. The problem is a) the schedule has not been informed by engineers, b) the schedule doesn't evolve as more information comes in (some things were easier, some were harder) and b2) if the project is going to be late, nobody realizes it until it's too late to do anything about it (like cut features.)

Death by metrics : Managers will measure productivity by number of lines checked in or number of bugs fixed. This encourages lots of code with lots of bugs.

Oversteering : When it becomes clear that the project is going to be late, managers do things that make it later : Pressure programmers to work more hours, add people, bang harder on their metrics.

Feature creep : This especially happens when Marketing wants to slip in some feature so they can do a demo.

Premature QA : Unleashing testers too early in development. Because, you know, the sooner you find the bugs the sooner you fix them! Result : Testers are banging on unfinished code that engineers already know doesn't work, creating enormous noise. Testers are also taking up engineering time learning how things are supposed to work (because there is no doc yet.)

Bozo explosion : (We can't blame managers for everything!) When companies get big, they start to hire so-so people, who then hire even worse people, until you've pretty much got an idiot farm.

I have always taken patronize to mean a specific form of condescension.

From the latin 'Pater' for 'father', 'patronize' implies assuming the tone of a parent speaking to a child. Paternalistic condescension.

Simply condescending might be, "Nice painting, I'm glad you've got a way to keep busy."

Patronizing would be, "Nice effort. When I was at the stage you are now, I took the time to really study perspective, composition and color balance. That's if you want to take it seriously, though. Not everyone does."

In the field of psychology called Transactional Dynamics, this sort of thing is studied in-depth.

In short, it's an incredibly fast way to piss people off.

Nah.

Two generations of movie heroines have met their demise because they can't seem to kick off their high heel shoes before running through the cemetary.

Hundreds of families have moved into houses, seen that the walls are crying blood and thought, "Let's sleep HERE. What's the worst that can happen?"

Comparitively, a cell phone is a rather minor thing to do away with. Especially since it runs out of charge, is easily broken and isn't waterproof.

I had this happen some years ago, and stumbled upon a solution quite by accident :

Plan a two-month leave of absence, six months from now :

You're going to be gone for two months. As in off-the-grid, in-the-desert, for-real gone.

This forces the issue - The company never wanted to make its day-to-day reliant on any one person, it just happened. They always intended to fix it, it was just never urgent. Now it is. There's six months to do knowledge-transfer, etc.

As the big day comes, confess that you're actually going to do some new development on your trip, sans internet connection. You want to put together some new stuff to show. Get their input on things they want to see.

When you return, hopefully, a new status quo will have emerged, where the company feels they don't need you to fire-fight, and is once again excited about what new work you've got underway.

Look out world - once I find my pants ...

Let it slide.

I often apply the 'symmetry test' to such situations :

If it was a woman doing the posting, and the post was something like, "I once met a man who listened and was emotionally mature ..." would it be offensive?

Nah - she's just venting after hitting a bump on the Love Road.

"But that's different because an oppressed minority is - "

No, shut up, it isn't.

Let it slide.

"No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy." -- Henry Kissinger

No.

Jesus.

It varies; it's perhaps instructive to look at it in increasing complexity :

In the beginning, was the bitmap. This is for black and white (or black and green, or any two colors). Each pixel was a single bit - 1 and 0 corresponding to the two colors.

For an image of 16x16 pixels, you'd have a string of 256 bits. (You would probably first have some header information giving dimensions, so the program knows how many more bits to scan and where to break each row.) A .BMP file is structured this way.

Then came color. On a color display, there are actually three numbers for each pixel, corresponding to Red, Green and Blue (usually) intensity. (Note - this is an artifact of the anatomical structure of the human eye - 3 different types of receptor cones).

For example, the "color depth" (number of available intensities) for each of Red, Green, Blue may be 256. So that's three bytes per pixel. So we follow the same strategy as for a bitmap, except each pixel is now 3x8=24 bits. This is called a pixmap.

This is the most general and basic way that arbitrary images are stored. There are more exotic schemes for particular types of images; for example : if an image is composed of lots of straight lines a scheme called Stroked Vector Graphics can be used, which is essentially a line-drawing program. I won't go into those special cases any further.

OK, back to pixmaps. The next step in complexity has to do with data compression. Pixmaps can get really big.

So the simplest thing to do is to compress it using something like the pkzip algorithm. This is essentially what a .gif file is, a compressed pixmap. The .gif is decompressed into its original pixmap and then rendered. A common mistake when the net was young was to try to pkzip a gif file. It doesn't get any smaller because it's already compressed.

A key distinction here is that the pixmap is restored to exactly its original form. This is called lossless compression.

It is possible to get much better compression (10x and more) if we relax the restriction that the pixmap must be with perfect accuracy. There are a bunch of cheats we can using our knowledge of vision that are barely visible but assist in greater compression. This is called lossy compression. JPG files are structured this way.

Disclaimer : This is only intended as a high level description; actual image types vary in various implementation details, especially the header information,

"Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door."

No, they won't. They'll say "nice mouse trap but I already have one."

"The service in this place sucks."

Agree with User, especially his point about seeing things for the first time as a child. That's pretty much a knock-out punch to that idea.

I've heard that tale about natives not being able to see ships for the first time. It's certainly apocryphal or at least a huge exaggeration. Sure, they may not notice its approach, unaccustomed as they were to anything of interest happening out at sea. They might not even notice a fleet as it approaches.

But once it's close and clear enough, somebody certainly uttered their native-tongue-equivalent of, "Whoa. What the fuck is that?"

There is none, and perhaps never will be (pending some major break-throughs in AI).

Just as there is no metric for the quality of prose.

As with prose, you can automate tests for any number of bad things :
Bugs, complexity, lack of modularization, etc.

So you can often detect bad code easily, but good code can only be detected by a set of experienced human eyeballs, who will often disagree, and whose aesthetic criteria change over time.

Some ideas :

People are grumpy when they're hungry. Here is an interesting study which shows that judges rulings are partially dependent on how hungry they are : http://www.economist.com/node/18557594 All of our perceptions can be tainted by an unmet need like hunger; especially when we can see other people joyfully munching away. So if the restaurant is a little noisy, the service a little slow, the menu lacks a favorite item - all of these things can get amplified. The person walks out with this diffuse sense of "meh, i don't like that place so much." Of course, if the kitchen is backed up and the order takes an hour to come out, this can reach yelpable levels.

We digest alcohol differently on an empty stomach. Alcohol profits exceed food profits in lots of places. Most people have heard "don't drink on an empty stomach" and assume the food serves to dilute the alcohol. It's actually much more drastic than that. There is a valve at the bottom of the stomach which stays open until you swallow food. On an empty stomach, your GI is in "liquid processing mode" - so that water and other drink are passed directly to your small intestines for rapid absorption. The presence of even a few bites of food closes the valve. Bread is ideal booze-food because it absorbs liquid like a sponge. So serving bread reduces the drunkenness of patrons and encourages an extra round or two.

Your order is taken while you're still hungry. Your order is usually taken before the bread has had a chance to reduce your hunger, so reducing your appetite doesn't reduce profits much. Dessert probably takes a hit.

Bread is often a signature dish. Red Lobster is a pretty crappy seafood place (are they still around?), frozen everything (but the lobster). But their cheddar cheese-bread is *awesome* and I had a couple of friends who went there for that reason.

To summarize, losing a potential dessert order is a small price to pay for a clientele which is happier, more patient, buying more drinks - oh. and clearing their table faster :)

Any deliberate deception is a lie.

The Gulu Gulu cafe offers free wifi and doesn't mind if you hang out for 5 hours after ordering a cup of coffee. Other cafes also offer wifi but are more mindful of hang-time.

The Salem Witch Trials. This has been turned into a tourist attraction, strangely enough. Salem is home to kitchy shops selling witch-paraphenalia, is home to pagans, neo-pagans, and many witch groups.

A little tight, on a workday. But there's a trick - there is a metered lot at 284 Essex St that tourists don't know about.

Remarkably vibrant for such a small town. Salem benefits from lots of tourists, Salem State College, and bands coming up from Boston and Cambridge.

Hot spots are Taven In the Square, Gulu Gulu Cafe, Rockefellas, Murphy's, and many others, all walkable from each other.

A dollar could last 3 hours or longer.

Some games, like Vanguard and Asteroids give you extra lives at certain score increments. So once you got past a certain skill level you could play until you hit a slump.

Certain games could also be 'hacked'. For example, in Asteroids - leave one asteroid and don't shoot it. Spend the rest of the time shooting the little spaceships that come out. The big score for that will rapidly rack up free lives.

Pacman allowed for perfect strategy : take the turns before you reach them, and faithfully follow the correct sequence and you can go all the way through to the end.

There were also a common hardware glitch, it only worked in air conditioned environments or otherwise dry air. By shuffling your feet against the carpet, holding a quarter in your hand and touch the metal plate in the front - the machine would go *zorch* and boot up with free credits.

Down to your last quarter? You can cash it in for 5 nickels and pound em out with a hammer until they were the size of a quarter.

OK, so you're out of quarters now. Check all the coin slots.

Nothing? Go up to a newbie playing Asteroids. "Give me 20 minutes on that game and I'll leave you with 15 extra lives."

Ah, 1982. *sigh

50 cc motor-scooter. Legal to park on sidewalks. No insurance, registration required. (technically you need a driver's license but no cop is going to pull you over and ask for it.) Lock that thing up tight - I got two stolen.

Zilch here too; but you may be running into some "Selection Bias."

Quorans are among the most net-savvy people on earth;

I'll bet there are plenty of older executives who would pay a hefty sum for this service.

Totally. Especially if it were a local concert that I had friends at, but couldn't attend myself.

I think so. Most voters still don't know what SOPA is. It's too techie, too complicated to swallow in one sound bite.

Virtually all voters know what Wikipedia is - and the news story itself that will trigger when Wikipedia goes dark will probably get more eyeballs than all the previous SOPA stories combined.

Wiikipedia is also not-for-profit, so their motives are pretty unassailable.

Even though SOPA has been shelved, PIPA is in the pipeline and lobbyists are hard at work - pulling every trick in the book - to advance this agenda. The shelving of SOPA will only energize them further.

(edit :) One of their best tactics may be to be retreat, throw their support behind a sympathetic presidential candidate and try to hinder the re-election of Obama this year. Given that this is the *media* industry, that's pretty serious business.

(edit #2 :) There may even be a back-room deal Obama is making with the media industry : wait until after the election.

What's needed is broad, popular contempt for this technology-crippling agenda such that most legislators don't want to incur the political damage of voting for it.

I think it's fair to say that the blackout will change the political landscape in which this stuff is playing out.

Used to have a terrible problem with this. No more. What I found :

Avoid alcohol and caffeine. Both leave metabolites in your system for a long time; acetaldehyde from alcohol is anxiety inducing as hell.

Steer away from unnecessary stressors. If you don't like to drive and can afford a cab - take it.

Steer into unavoidable stressors. If you can't afford a cab - drive and drive and drive (exposure therapy).

Practice controlled breathing http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=46922 This is startlingly effective for many people; some have posited that anxiety/panic is a disorder rooted in the brain's "suffocation alarm".

The herbal remedy Kava Kava has been clinically shown to alleviate anxiety, in some cases as effectively as a prescription benzodiazepene with fewer side effects. It is legal for anyone to buy in the USA, and a ban in the EU was lifted three years ago after some initial concern over potential for liver damage. Important note - it's got to be processed properly to be effective. It tastes pretty bad but induces a lucid calm with a slight euphoric buzz. It works right away. I recommend this source if you want to try it : http://www.konakavafarm.com/ (the paste or capsules.)

Benzodiazepene medication can be prescribed by a doctor or psychiatrist - these include klonopin, atavin, xanax. They are very effective but are also central nervous system depressants that can a) make depression worse and b) be very hard to get off of. But they can be a good bridge so you can get on with your life in the short term.

Nutrition : Eat well. Especially avoid sugar which can spike your glucose levels. Opt for slow-burning carbohydrates which can be found in diets designed for people with hyperglycemia.

Exercise.

Learn self hypnosis and visualization, http://www.wikihow.com/Perform-Self-Hypnosis

Balance your life. Each day work a bit, play a bit, do nothing a bit. Be around people, be alone. Etc. Anxiety tends to lock people in fixed patterns of behavior which make the anxiety worse

Disclaimer : Again, this is my personal experience, I am not a professional and your mileage may vary.

I'm going to be blunt in the hopes of being helpful.

A friend read your query and commented :

"But he's three standard deviations below douche-bag."

She's nineteen. She's right.

OK - Marilyn Vos Savant is about 2 standard deviations above you in IQ tests. And she's an idiot. She wrote a book claiming Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was invalid because the theorem uses non euclidean geometry which isn't ... yanno ... real. Just embarassingly stupid.

So. Look : Lose the whole IQ thing. People don't vandalize your car because you are smart or even aloof. This treatment is reserved for douche-bags.

Start climbing the scale on the social skills meter. And when you do, don't measure your standard deviations from the norm.

Take heed of my bearded friend :

Well, I'd leave it out of the Valedictorian speech, anyway.

It may come from the french "de rien" and the spanish "de nada", both of which are the accepted response to "thank you" and which mean "nothing" or "it's nothing".

"No problem" seems like a clarification of that idiom.

This is called Short Selling. It's a rather clever way of betting that a stock will drop rather than rise.

You borrow some shares of that stock. You sell them immediately.
You wait as the price drops. Then you buy them back and return them to the lender. You get to keep the left-over cash.

In the case of entire nations; you pick a company/fund/instrument which is dependent on the overall health of that economy.

(edit : Ravin Thambapillai makes a good point about gold; you wouldn't want to be holding dollars while the Chinese economy tanks)

The term slang-term "random", meaning "half-assed", "senseless" or "arbitrary" peaked in use around the mid nineties I think.

This was a common insult Bill Gates would use in the very early days of Microsoft (1980 or so). He would point to code and say, "that's totally random".

This seems to have spilled out of Microsoft culture, over to Seattle, down to the Valley, and east to Boston where it took hold at Harvard and MIT.

(This is fairly wild conjecture on my part, but i'm pretty sure it's true.)

Discovering where we are. By watching the sky and thinking really, really hard for generations.

"We are here."

It grows.

Western Civilization is an engine which consumes more and more resources, produces more and more people. We always speak of "economic growth" as if it is inherently good.

In the sense of social darwinism, it is.

In a world with limited space and resources, however - it's a recipe for starvation, fuel exhaustion and climate disruption.

They are in Kitty Elysium now but my two cats were :

Furry Unit Number 16 (nick : sixteen)

and

Calgary Ilyich Von Toast Monkey (nick : calgary)

(They were calico mutts. Calgary was a manx, daugher of 16.)

Just make up any crazy crap you want! How will we check?

Note : be awake at 12:01 and fix things up.

It's astounding : Time is fleeting.

Madness ... takes its toll.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein.
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke.

One asks the other for change for the parking meter.

A dollar bill also changes hands.

Romantic partners would almost never settle such a small debt.

So subtle it might only register unconsciously, which is perhaps more effective.

Only if you fence with them.

Luddites of the digital age.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

They're not familiar with the modulus operator (how often does it come up really?)

Then they take a wrong turn trying to use several counters or loops, quickly get tangled up, and are a little nervous to begin with.

People actually get pretty smug about this. Would I be excited about a coder who can't do FizzBuzz? No.

But it's pretty understandable how it can happen. Interviewers : chill.

I suppose ole Mozart and Beethoven deserve a spot on this page.

They both are still regarded by many as the greatest composers to ever live; time seems only to increase their fame.

The cheat code for the BFG9000

http://revo-emag.com/?p=1025

Seriously, that thing blew up everything in the room.

A japanese company produced a dishwasher whose water jets moved chaotically. I can't find the product now but the researchers were Nomura, Wakami and Kondo, 1995.

Germany in 1900 was perhaps the most advanced country on earth. It may have had equals but it had no superior in engineering, in art (especially music), literature and philosophy. It was civilized, ingenious, productive - a great jewel of western civilization.

Then it was vanquished in World War I. Stripped of territory, crushed under reparations, humiliated (over the US's objections.)

The result of course was that they rose again with an insane ferocity that plunged the next generation into the worst nightmare in human history.

The lesson was well learned. You don't kick a defeated opponent when he's down. You prop him back up, help him rebuild, and plant the seeds of a stable democracy.

Thriving democracies have no reason to fight each other.

To add to Colin Gerber's excellent answer about how this idea got into your doctor's head :

The organization Autism Speaks was the publicity engine behind this piece of junk science.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/01/15/this-question-has-been-asked-and-answered.html

It began when a lousy scientist got confused about causation versus correlation and announced that vaccines cause autism. (Especially blaming the common vaccine component thimerosal - mercury. Get it? Mercury, brain damage, autism.)

Suddenly, autism appeared to be a largely man made, preventable disorder.

An organization was formed to fight the Evil Corporations and Get The Truth Out.
Oh - and there was billions to be made in lawsuits. That too. Autism Speaks was born.

The usual activism machine did what it always does : holds walkathons, conferences, buys TV ads. Careers were launched as otherwise unremarkable people became leaders, spokespeople, visionaries and martyrs.

In the end, it was driven by greed, baseless resentment and ego.

When the science turned out to be bad, Autism Speaks didn't back down - for the simple reason that the vaccine theory had become their raison d'etre,

(edit:) PS : It is my strong personal view you not argue with this doctor, but simply fire him and explain that you prefer a medical professional who keeps themselves informed on important issues in patient care. The debunking of the vaccine-autism link is all over the web and backed by the world's foremost medical authorities. It's been covered in major news outlets. He should know this. It's his job.

It would be male because it gets into everything, fights a lot. and can't find its keys ... When people lose their keys, where should they look? What are some places where people frequently misplace their keys?

The original I Kiss You site (which was the inspiration for Borat, btw)

http://www.istanbul.tc/mahir/mahir/

I'm quite serious, in a minimalist way I guess.

("I like sex! Who is want to come to Turkey? I can invitate. She can stay in my home.")

There is something very human and genuine in his awkward cloying. Lots of people think so :

In addition to maximum penalties for the charges against them, their identities should be made public online so that this act forever haunts them via the same media they used to boast of it.

One of the attackers who didn't cover his face has been identified as Raymond Palomino, 17 years old :

The other attackers are identified here, http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=219_1326803804 but i won't repeat the names in this forum as their faces are covered and there is always the possibility of mistaking their identity. Court records should soon confirm their identities (they are likely to be tried as adults.)

Wait - shouldn't we wait for a conviction ? I don't believe so. That video makes each of us witnesses to the crime in a moral sense; the only question is that of identity, not guilt of those filmed.

Reasonable people may differ on this point but there it is.

A few points after I put on my asbestos underpants.

OK:

The American Literati universally disregard Ayn Rand (author) as not just wrong, but unworthy of rebuttal (i.e., tedious nonsense). To be clear: there may be visionary proponents of rational self-interest, but Rand isn't one.

Lots of people do buy her book. Falling in-and-out of love with Atlas Shrugged is viewed as a sort of embarassing phase in a person's intellectual adolescence.

So what's behind this popular appeal in the US? Some thoughts:

America in the 20th century underwent a shift towards Collectivism: Income Taxes, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, The New Deal, the Great Society, etc. This created great internal conflict which Rand's work speaks to.

America also underwent a decades-long cold war with the Soviet Union. We were seriously spooked by communism. Rand's work speaks to that fear.

Rand's first book: The Fountainhead, was actually pretty good. An architect sees his design corrupted by greedy developers (they want to put Roman columns at the entrance of a sleek modern structure, for example). This simple defense of the sanctity of ideas was quite reasonable and compelling (Rand somehow misses the irony that in a free market, the purchasers of the architect's blueprint are perfectly free to screw with it in any way they please).

So Rand was already famous in America when Atlas Shrugged was released, and in fact there was an aggressive marketing campaign in the US before Atlas Shrugged was even finished.

Finally, America has always been inordinately proud of its (er, former) industrial might. People like Thomas Alva Edison are heroes. Even those with questionable ethics like William Randolph Hearst and John D. Rockefeller are viewed with awed reverence. These are the same heroes as in Atlas Shrugged.

In Chris Farley's "Motivational Speaker Sketch", David Spade and Christina Applegate can't keep it together and have to just cover their faces to hide their laughter :

Dawdle.

Alpha types seem possessed of this deep sense that life is ticking away, and now is the time to do stuff.

Steve Jobs expressed this -

for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

If you havin' Perl problems I feel bad for you son, I got ninety-nine servers runnin' all Python.

I always meant to blog, but could never quite get around to it.

The 'reverse-blogging'' nature of quora - where there is this sense of urgency because at least one person (the questioner) really cares about the content - has spurred me to do some writing on a variety of topics.

It got me writing.

I just started over christmas break. A welsh friend introduced me to it.

So, um, +1 I guess.

The short answer is Yes, especially for multicore processors.

Functional Programming's tenets of immutable data and no side-effects ensures that parallel processes don't clobber each other's data.

The early Cray supercomputers used a variant of Lisp.

For more on this subject, see Dr. Dobb's article :
http://drdobbs.com/tools/212201710

Meme. I still don't know how to pronounce it ...

I must disagree with the well-intentioned answers given.

On one special day of the year ... penguins take flight.

If I had to save only one ... The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel ...

Alexander Graham Bell personally hated the telephone. He found it noisy and intrusive. In his working years, he refused to have one installed in his office.

As an old man, his family attempted to install one in his house in case of an emergency. The phone kept 'breaking' due to apparent acts of tinkering sabotage.

Also - on the occasion of his death, every Bell telephone in existence was silenced for one minute in his honor.

Heads-up, hands-free mobile technology.

The days of holding your smartphone and poking at it will soon draw to a close. The technology is already there.

Your 'phone' will be the size of a cigarette lighter, clipped to you somewhere. A heads-up visual display will render textual and graphical information from your eyeglasses (or sunglasses or vanity glasses). You will browse by looking in certain directions and using voice commands.

Ears, eyes and mouth will be more wired more directly into the grid via "smart glasses" (with headphones and mic.)

Wow good question. Disclaimer : I believe in a supreme Being.

Once people assort themselves into tribes, a major social-darwinistic advantage is gained by a belief in : a) A creator b) an afterlife c) "tribal exceptionalism" - that this tribe is looked upon with special favor by the Creator.

This creates tribe members more willing to die for the tribe in battle. They believe that they are headed to a better place.

So in a social-darwinism sense, tribes with these supernatural beliefs can be expected to fight more aggressively (we certainly see that with radical Islam today.) To the extent that evolution challenges these beliefs, evolution theory can put societies at an evolutionary disadvantage.

In addition to the other answers which indicate there is no reason at all to suspect boiling water makes it safer (it's really not intuitive at all), there does appear to have been an unconscious realization - or perhaps evolutionary pressure - toward boiling water.

Tea became popular virtually everywhere it was introduced : China, India, Europe, the USA, etc. Tea drinking cultures got sick less, lived to raise more tea drinking children, who became tea-drinking soldiers etc.

For people who had no reason to believe boiling water killed pathogens, humanity spent a hell of a lot of time boiling their water.

Neither the French nor the Japanese were a brutalized and exploited minority.

Axioms are just an abbreviated conditional.

For example, we may have the axiom "parallel lines do not cross.". Call it P.

Rather than 'assuming' axiom P, we could state in front of every statement we wish to express (in euclidean geometry.)

If P, then ...

So we're completely agnostic about P. And really, mathematics is always agnostic about its axioms. It would just get tedious to write all these conditionals all the time, so we wrap them up in a set of axioms.

It's short-hand, and implies no actual belief in the statement.

This actually works :

Get yourself a really cool looking motor scooter, like this :

People will ask you about it wherever you go. Ice broken.

The harsh realities of life will confront them soon enough.

Childhood is a magical time for kids. They are shielded, their dreams indulged. The buoyancy of this magic will last a lifetime and carry them through the storms that lie ahead.

Get 'em what they want. This time is short.

500 year lifetime. It's much, much too short.

It could lead to awkward situations like this :

Manipulated. It's distasteful.

(The couple is an israeli woman and non-israeli man; the woman is observing Memorial Day - a somber occasion with candles and music. The guy is clueless.)

Obviously, the woman could have just told the guy. Not a big deal.

Excellent movie on the subject, Inside Job:

This documentary film explains:

Traditional banks got into the investment business.

'Derivatives' were invented. These are exotic packages of other instruments (like home loans). They are largely unregulated.

Credit Rating Agencies like Moody's Investors Service straight up lied about the quality of derivatives. This attracted conservative investment like retirement funds.

Now that banks had a lucrative way to offload bad home loans, they started giving mortgages to anybody who walked in off the street. 1997-2006 United States Housing Bubble ensued.

In addition to the other excellent answers, there is a huge bootstrapping problem.

It's really tough to get somewhere from nothing. You need a job, but you don't have clothing appropriate for an interview. Maybe you don't even have an acceptable, current form of ID. No phone for them to call you back.

You have no laptop to search for more jobs and check email. The library offers an hour free internet time but it's a five mile walk away.

And the sole of your right shoe just fell off.

Good answers all. A small addition :

Hit the ground running in the morning. Pre-industrial humans were fairly active little monkeys who were active pretty much upon wakening. It's my personal theory that a lot of people are encountering trouble "starting their motor" in our recently developed industrial world.

Specifically, as soon as possible, get outside and get walking. Even if it's a few blocks away to a coffee shop. Brisk pace is better. Farther is better too.

Again, my personal theory. If I don't do this I tend to feel low energy all day.

The Laws of Form seem to be saying something very important, and Russell's endorsement is impressive. It's also very beautifully written.

However, if you reflect on it after a while - you realize Spencer-Brown isn't saying anything. It's a rather ponderous reformulation of Propositional Logic with just two operators (OR and NOT). This trick (and notation) had been in use by switching engineers for a generation.

We already had Propositional Logic.

In the last chapter, Spencer-Brown tries to do something original when he tries to develop a multi-valued logic to handle states which change over time (like an oscillator.) Here, he devolves into hand-waving and doesn't build anything precise.

Spencer-Brown further damaged his reputation by claiming a simpler proof to the four-color map problem, which he never provided.

I would add lots of fun analytics. Those upvotes are very addictive; I think people would enjoy more feedback to gawk at.

How do my upvotes look graphically since I joined? How have my followers grown over time? What topics are trending?

What milestones have I passed? Etc.

An immediate halt to fossil fuel production would be more calamitous than a lifestyle change.

Our agriculture is wholly dependent on fossil fuels; industry and transportation would also stop. There would be widespread famine, complete economic collapse (money is worthless) and probable collapse of military and police.

A likely outcome would be small bands of armed raiders trying to grab the last remaining food, fuel and water while those areas which could actually sustain themselves become fortresses who shoot at anybody who approaches.

We have no idea how to feed 7 billion people if oil were suddenly shut off.

Groupon manages this with a straight up cash offer (redeemable in groupons.)

Note that it's not a one-off thing (10 bucks or so for broadcasting the deal) but rather 10 bucks for every friend that clicks through that (personalized) link.

People are savvy about network effects and think, "if i get five people, that's fiddy bucks. I could use fiddy bucks."

It's not clear that this tactic is economically sustainable (profits, Groupon?)

I get where the negative answers are coming from, my gut reaction was "b-i-t-c-h".

But really, she's just being a little cocky and wants to get with you.

Which aren't necessarily bad things.

Feed every human.

(chart shows hungry/malnourished people, in millions, by area)

Sure. FB is for quick communication with people I know.

Quora is for deep communication with people I don't.

The Bothersome Man : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808185/

Streaming on Netflix. A man attempts suicide, and ends up in a very peculiar purgatory. Life is easy and ... bland. Nothing is bad, nothing is good, nothing feels likes anything at all. Chocolate doesn't taste good, wounds don't hurt.

The hero tries to kill himself - again. He won't die. So he plots his escape ...

(Disclaimer : when I say 'Abstract Art' i really mean 'American Abstract Expressionism')

Abstract art is about retraining your eyes to stop looking for an image.

We are so used to scanning for objects in real life and in representational art.
You have to quiet that part of your mind. Abstract art isn't of anything. You're
not supposed to recognize objects or be dazzled at the artist's skill. Abstract art can be very simple; the artist is attempting to communicate feeling in a radically more direct way than representational art.

Take a look at Jackson Pollock :

Maybe you see a drunken jazz party. Stop that. This isn't a Rorschach test.

Now you think, "Man, this isn't hard. My kid could do this!" Knock it off, this isn't a skill contest.

Look. It's paint and surface, nothing else. Feel the swirls. Their energy. Their tangling. Pollock goes all the way to the edge of the canvas where it's just as busy as the center. Feel the tension as everywhere the eye looks, you miss something. It's hard to take in.

You don't have to like it. If you hate it, hate it passionately, for what it is.

Here's Rothko :

Not much seems to be here. Give it some time. How do the colors feel? Alone and in contrast? The borders - they're kind of smudgy. What feeling does that give?

Many people find Rothko's work terribly sad; maybe you feel the same way. If so, you're definitely beginning to get it. But you may feel differently altogether - as long as you're feeling something you're 'getting' abstract art.

Keep at it, keep trying. In my case, it came all at once staring at a Pollock. In an instant some circuit went off and I was all "Oh. My. God." From that instant forward I found myself saying "The only real art is abstract."

Try other "Abstract Expressionists" and other flavors of Abstract. It'll come.

To add to Russell Canty's excellent answer :

In simulations anyway, this tactic was employed in just one circumstance : To sneak up behind a sub and sink it with torpedoes - before the target sub had a chance to launch countermeasures or torps in response.

It's a very dangerous maneuver.

I heard some sub commanders say this was sometimes done to simply spook the "Victor" (soviet) as part of the continual underwater cat-and-mouse psychological game that was played.,

There is a deep, financial cost to being an asshole which is untraceable.

First, good people leave. Usually the best. "I'm good at this, why not be respected somewhere else?"

They don't tell you they're leaving because you're an asshole, that is not in their interest. You get the usual "pursue other great opportunities despite my rewarding tenure here at blah blah blah ..."

But they'll tell everybody else. Not out of spite; because it's valuable information.

Word spreads. VC's find out. Big clients find out. Coders find out, your landlord finds out.

Suddenly, you're "unlucky". The best people don't apply. Sales drop. Schedules slip. Your lease doesn't get renewed because the landlord wants to give his brother-in-law a break (who happened to be a former salesman of yours.)

Uh oh. Board meeting time. Bad news to break. Yea - you'll be real nice now.

Don't wait.

Agree with Andrew Lemke, the next step isn't economic, it's an Israeli military strike which is unlikely to knock out all of Iran's nuclear capacity.

Just a really bad scenario unfolding.

To state User's answer a little differently, both Miles and Jack end up in good places despite a series of god awful decisions and screwups.

They stumble sideways into their destiny; that is - despite the fact they are walking the wrong way, they end up in the right place.

Lie.

I was asked to burn up Cray computer tine while working for the DoD, to give the appearance the Cray was being used (it wasn't.)

i 'forgot'.

Bah, leave language alone.

It really comes down to intent. By far most Americans do not intend to invoke any racial slur at all. The minority who do are dicks and won't listen anyway.
There is no intent in using 'chink' in the canonical sense; i'll bet there are even a few people who use it to refer to Asians without realizing it's derogatory.

Talking too much.

About 10% of the human race has this weird disease where they're not actually conversing (taking turns), they just go on and on about whatever topic suits them at the moment - usually some mundane interpersonal or logistical issue.

They won't let go of the talking stick. You can't change topics.

They seem oblivious to the fact people tend to avoid them. Booze of course can make this much worse.

Shaddap already.

No.

Google finds content. Quora generates it.

Crowdsourcing can be civil, constructive, and respectful.

Sure there's a few bad apples, but for the most part Quora signals a hard break from the past where online forums were pretty hostile places to be.

I think there are a lot of loaded questions in Religion.

I'm a fervent supporter of gay rights, but when I see a question like this - Why are so many religions and religious people driven into a frenzy by homosexuality? I'm tempted to coin the phrase "God bashing".

It's an unfair characterization of believers.

I think in general API-based apps are the Right Thing. It's easier to adapt your app to other platforms like mobile apps and even SMS-based interfaces.

It's sort of like Functional Programming, where there are no side effects and everything comes out very clean.

The only drawback I can see is that Session is not maintained on the server automatically (it would be a side effect.) This feels a little awkward to experienced web developers and makes them do some extra work.

For a serious project that is really going places, the extra work is probably worth it. If you just want to bang up a prototype though, API-centric may be overkill.

Rainman with the world's largest porn collection.

It may serve as a signal of sexual attraction, hence rouge.

Use tactical nuclear weapons. There was a general sense (tho not universal) that NATO would be unable to hold off a Soviet invasion with conventional weapons.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19841201&id=IpwzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=zDIHAAAAIBAJ&pg=1778,4404141

Gin and tonic does a great job of concealing the taste of booze.

So does vodka and fruit juice.

And here's a weird one : mix triple sec with soda water in a shot glass. Slam it on the table and drink it quick. I don't know why this works but it does. (Sprite works in the absence of soda water.)

Brainzzz.

"Did you get my last email/text ?"

Unless the person never got one from you, they have no way of knowing if the last one they read is the last one you sent.

Jon Mixon (Quora user) is right. I have encountered this as well and a) it gets worse b) it is often the suspicious person who is untrustworthy themselves. "A liar is one who won't believe anyone else."

"When you are going through hell, keep going." -- Winston Churchill.

Coke was very expensive in the early seventies, well out of reach of your average "street" drug user. It was also considered relatively harmless. As a stimulant, people could still be productive on it (even hyper productive.)

It found popularity among show business types who could more easily afford it and who needed to be 'on'.

Cocaine use was common, for example, in 1976 during writing sessions of Saturday Night Live. It was all over Studio 54. Paramount head Robert Evans was coked up constantly, finally getting busted for it in 1980.

Really, it permeated the movie and TV business. This is likely where it picked up its glamorous sheen.

Photo : stage prop at Studio 54 depicting the Man on the Moon with cocaine spoon.

We were here.

Watch out for the ice, it moves.

Don't make bombs out of the heavy metals from the ground.

Don't burn too much of the black liquid down there either.

Try not to fight over the question of Who created all this. We never found out for sure.

Try not to fight at all.

Beware the tiniest creatures, too small to see, some so small they are barely alive. They're the most dangerous.

In all our time here, we never got a visitor from somewhere else. We never saw a flicker of life from the sky. As far as we know, there is no place like this, and no creature like you.

It's a very special place. Good luck.

Please, tell me more about your dream last night.

Why have I never been audited?

Where can I find KFed deep tracks?

Get your boobs out of my face until I'm done with my taxes.

OK, my original answer in may is the corgi stampede at the bottom of my answer.

This just in, trending on youtube : Twin 11 month-old girls rockin out to Dad's guitar.
This is cute beyond all reason ...

Corgi puppy stampede, FTW :

The movies I most enjoyed seeing with my Dad weren't kid movies (by the time I was 7 or so, I was precocious, but something tells me your kids are too.)

The original Star Wars.

The World's Fastest Indian. A strong bonding between old man and young boy, very much a guy flick but in all the good ways. Also, a true story - an old man in his seventies breaks the world speed record on a motorcycle - the record still stands.

Go.

You can not go later.

Set your time machine back to 2012, get out, and bash it to pieces with a sledgehammer.

Been there, done that.

Sometimes it helps to be very clear, direct, leave the ball in her court and allow for a graceful exit.

"If you're not attached, I'd really like to take you out. Text me if you wanna." Drop your digits on the table and walk away.

I am Jewish, so Dersh can't call me antisemitic.

Dersh is a total douchebag.

Many American Jews and Israeli Jews oppose Likud's policies, let alone those parties farther to the right in Netanyahu's coalition.

Dersh has resorted to simple name-calling, and knows it.

Dersh is a total douchebag.

The success of Science, that is: the discovery of perfect laws, of deep structure in reality - can be interpreted by some as evidence of the existence of God.

Hunting. Killing animals for fun should be unthinkable.

Boxing. Paying two people to beat the crap out of each other for our amusement (thanx, ancient rome) degrades our whole species. (I do enjoy watching the classic Ali/Frazier/Forman/Tyson bouts, but shouldn't.)

Bull fighting. Except when the matador gets skewered. j/k. Not really.

Free energy. There are persistent myth that free energy machines have been invented. No, they haven't. Such an idea wouldn't be suppressed, it would be immediately coopted by the military industrial complex to get us off Arab oil, and to relieve the headaches of nuclear reactor maintenance (and accidents).

Aliens have landed and putzed around. Kidnapped people. Made crop circles. Blew up cows. Built the pyramids. Look : Any species advanced enough to cross space doesn't need to land to study us in detail; if they did they could do it in a way which is totally undetectable. If they wanted to make contact they could plop down on the white house lawn. Or light up the night sky with a big, "Hi! We're aliens and stuff."

Crazy assed conspiracies : The illuminati control history. And the Masons. And the Jews, the Skull and Bones Society, the Bilderberg group. Look : certainly there are groups that have schemed for global control. It's too damned hard with all the other groups trying to control the world, the unpredictable nature of war and revolution, the unforseen consequences of technology. Nobody can execute strategy that perfectly. 9/11 was not an inside job. The slightest screwup in that plan risked exposing the perpetrators who would have been executed for treason and mass murder. Not a resonable gamble for the rich and powerful who have it pretty good. Nobody pulls the strings because there's too many strings and they don't stay attached long.

Socialism : We need to let people get rich. Build empires. Buck the system, drop out of school, launch an idea nobody thinks will work. This isn't possible in a state control economy.

Capitalism : We're letting humans starve, for Christ's sake.

I was a hot-head in my youth. I'm not anymore.

It was the dot-com boom and everybody was stressed, distracted and frustrated. A noob walked into a meeting and talked on and on and on without addressing the problem.

I blurted out, "OK. This is the part of the meeting where you shut the f--- up!"

I couldn't believe it. The guy, stunned, just sat down. I apologized after the meeting, and then in email, and then took him out to lunch. I still never felt I could make it right.

That was ten years ago and i have never said a word in anger like that to any coworker, noob or not. It was that day I learned the importance of Chill.

He's doing really well now, VP at a big company. Caught up with him and he joked, "Really - it was time for me to shut the f--- up. But ..." "... you don't say that", I finished for him. He laughed, "No, you really don't. Anyway, it's cool. Send me your resume?"

One day, a long long time ago, a timid primate overcame his or her deep, instinctive fear of fire. S/he approached a fire probably caused by lightening, and carried a piece of it away.

Within just a few centuries meat became a regular part of the descendant's diet. The stomach shrank and the spine straightened.

This unknown Prometheus did more to change the course of humanity than anyone else, I believe.

Amount to something.

Microsoft's investment in Apple of $150M in 1997, which saved Apple from bankruptcy.

MS revived a monster competitor who charged into critical new markets like mobile, who's now worth more, who leads the world in mind-share, and who taunts them to blistering effect in TV ads.

Dozens of news casters would be fired for cracking up while trying to report on the demise of thousands. Were this to occur during any event involving Ping Pong, it would simply be unreportable.

Good answers here, in summary : The monolith is a device placed by an unseen alien race/force. It imparts knowledge or intelligence to the early primates.

To add another point - notice what they are eating, before and after their encounter with the monolith. Before - they are foraging around for berries. They are surrounded by boars (?) who are competing for the same food supply.

After - they're munching boar meat. They realize a hand-held bone makes an effective hunting tool.

They just got promoted way up the food chain.

Humans.

Fourteen racoons.

The '08 financial crisis triggered a spike in the demand for gold. People saw gold as a hedge against other uncertain instruments and against inflation. Once the price started to rise, many economists claim a speculative bubble ensued where investors were just chasing after other investors.

It also became easier to buy and sell gold through the creation of Exchange Traded Funds, which made trading in gold a point-and-click transaction.

Edit : flip flopping my answer from Yes to No.

In light of this report, it seems that they're not. The claim in the Western press that enrichment near 20% points toward a weapons program isn't really tenable. Thanks to User-11710714367496047926 for shedding some light on this here, If Iran nukes Israel or vice-versa, why should anybody else be threatened by that? What is the big deal? Why should the world declare war on Iran?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/23/us-iran-usa-nuclear-idUSBRE82M0G020120323

"The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran's nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead." -- Tabassum Zakaria and Mark Hosenball, Reuters

"This is so historic."

E. Power Biggs doing the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

I don't know why, but nobody else seems to play it right. Biggs seems to get just the right timing of dissonance and consonance.

Death of a Salesman.

The heart wrenching tale of not a hero who dies in battle, not a martyr, not a drunken artist - but an ordinary man whose life is flickering out.

His values are somewhat corrupt - he believes in 'success' and personal attractiveness. He's disappointed that his sons aren't attractive. He's cheated on his wife. He's not very ethical but we feel great sympathy for him.

Not a great man brought down by great crimes; an ordinary man whose life amounts to nothing due to the commonest transgressions. A life which is passing unnoticed.

In its ordinariness, the tale takes on an almost unbearable sadness.

"Attention must be paid", the protagonist often objects.

Arthur Miller. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 1949.

Image recognition is generally CPU and RAM intensive. Normally I wouldn't worry about speed at all until you've built your first prototype, but in this case I would do the image processing in the cloud because :

It's known to be a resource hog.

You may wish to use a library not in Java (like OpenCV or something.)

As you make improvements to it (now it can count cars, bicycles and beer cans!) all of your users get that functionality without updating their app.

CopSlap 600.

It's female wing-man mission control. Your fate depends on what happens in there.

I would rather say 'extra-rational'.

KPAX, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272152/.

We are introduced to a psychiatric patient and left wondering whether he is delusional or an alien (as he claims to be.)

It's not until the song that accompanies the credits that we learn that he was, in fact, an alien.

Uncyclopeda http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com is a huge, funny, crowd-sourced spoof of Wikipedia.

It may make sense to "diversify" your private info among companies who don't like to cooperate. Use hotmail, for instance.

"If a product is free, remember : you are the real product."

Some years ago, through circumstances too sordid to expand upon, I found myself near a highway without a car, a wallet, or a phone. I was completely disconnected. I didn't know what I would do next.

I walked toward a nearby town, but it was a long walk. I got a little tired. It was a warm, sunny day. I decided I would really like to take a nap before continuing.

I walked up a grassy hill, and a bit down the other side so traffic wouldn't see me. I lay down in the grass.

I suppose I should have been very upset, but I wasn't. Free from any connection, expectation - any certainty at all about what the next few hours would bring ... I was able to just lay there, Like I was floating on grass, untethered to the human world.

I'll never forget it.

(I bumped into an old friend by coincidence when I finally got into town and things sorted themselves out.)

Israel certainly has a contingency plan to not only strike back at Iran, but to unleash its stockpile of 200 or so warheads at all its Arab neighbors. The rationale being, "let's stop the next war now as well."

I'm not saying that would necessarily happen, but clearly the option has been considered.

It would be a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe of WWII proportions.

The oil-dependent powers would find it necessary to invade and occupy the entire mideast to secure the oil supply. This would probably not happen quickly enough to stave off global economic collapse and famine.

G+ didn't solve a problem. Or rather, the only problem G+ attempted to solve was Google's envy of Facebook.

I walk into a little, family-owned wine shop on a slow day and let the owner make suggestions. I tell him/her what my favorite cheeses or other food is, what wines I've liked before, and they make suggestions. I assure them that it's OK if I don't like it, I'll be back.

Every now and then I just ask "Forget about me - what do *you* like?"

I would suggest that when Google tries to duplicate your functionality, you're not in trouble - you are trouble. Quora is a deeply engaging, well designed and unique tool.

Will their numbers grow? Will they cash out for a billion? I don't f------ know.

But they made a dent in the universe, and that matters more (to me anyway.)

Esther Schindler's essay on this is pretty awesome. To summarize (unless she wants to herself : )

Things got weird in the MS/IBM partnership as MS entered the consumer market with their own competing Windows OS.

IBM had a huge culture-clash with a new generation of young techies. IBM knew how to talk with big companies, not small time (initially) app developers, online communities, or even customers. Their UI was sub-par even though their OS was more stable. They just didn't get how to foster excitement, loyalty and community.

Kurt Gödel showed signs of paranoid schizophrenia - he starved himself to death in the belief people were poisoning his food.

Howard Hughes suffered from a debilitating fear of germs and other Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) traits.

(EDIT : 3/31/2015) I don't see it mentioned elsewhere, but Alanzo Church devised the Lambda-Calculus to express algorithms in the 1950's. He was working on theorems regarding computability (see Church-Turing Theorem). Lisp is a very close implementation of the Lambda Calculus.

Some languages, like C, are good for doing a huge collection of simple things very fast. So a game, or an operating system like UNIX come out well in C.

LISP, on the other hand, abandons speed and tight interaction with the hardware. LISP is focused on solving very deep algorithmic problems. So LISP trades speed and hardware access for :

Minimal syntax : You can write the LISP syntax on a match book cover. The language is really trying to get out of your way.

Ease of analysis : The lack of side effects means that a LISP function serves a single, clear purpose : Take in some stuff - don't change it (immutability), pass back some new stuff - and do nothing else (no side effects.) It's thus easier to be confident about a function's correctness (and to prove theorems about it.)

Parallel friendliness. Sure - LISP can be slow - and AI problems can be computationally intensive (think chess.) However, the two features mentioned above - immutability and lack of side effects makes LISP easier to parallelize on supercomputers. So while LISP may be 10x slower, the problems it attacks are so hard that a 100,000x boost is required. Hardware can achieve this, exploiting LISP's parallel-friendly design.

No distinction between data and code : Code is data and data is code. So LISP can write LISP, and often does.

There is also an historical reason : LISP is MIT's language. The very bricks of MIT are coded in LISP. MIT's been the center of AI research since the late 60's.

(I know, I know, Stanford, Caltech, Harvard might object to that last :) )

You can't. Facebook blocks animated GIFs.

See Why doesn't Facebook allow animated Gifs?

Edit : Starting 4/4/2012, I started to see animated GIFs (apparently) in my feed.

Ceast and Desist orders are pretty routine. Lawyers will often bang them out based simply on a hunch. They hope to get lucky and the legal letter head intimidates the target into stopping.

In the US, they can be sent by anyone at all. You don't even have to be a lawyer.

In this case, Rick Stratton has nothing to do with the offending website. He should not call facebook's lawyer - lawyers sometimes take this opportunity to employ intimidation tactics they would never commit to writing.

He should simply reply with a letter, return-receipt, which says "I received your Ceast and Desist Letter dated X. I have no involvement in the creation or control of http://www.defaceable.com/."

That's it. He'll probably never hear from them again.

/Not a lawyer

I liked Garrick Saito's answer and agree with his points. My take is this :

It's perfectly OK not to respond to comments. It's not like fan mail!

As for trolls, the ancient net addage "don't feed the trolls" applies. If someone is just being contrary with no substance, it's really important for me (and probably the community) to let them have the last word. Flame wars are a big time waster for the Answerer. There is a huge emotional temptation to respond. That temptation is misguided. A reply draws you into a non constructive flame war, and rewards the troll. When people starve off the trolls, they tend to get bored and go away.

For people who aren't trolling but disagreeing substantively, I still usually don't reply. I trust the reader to think for themselves, read my view, the commenter's view, and work it out for themselves. In fact, if a disagreeing comment strikes me as especially cogent, I will usually upvote it.

Convergence Comments should be shorter than the answer, the the reply shorter than the commernt, etc, This avoids the "wall of text" flame war and brings the disagreement to a rapid conclusion.

In short, I've found that the key to maintaining my sanity in online forums is being very selective about what I reply to

Yo momma so ugly, i pushed her face in dough and made gorilla cookies.

Yo momma so fat, she jumped up in the air and got stuck.

Long list here, i'll take a stab :

Bob was universally reviled and ridiculed.

Vista was a massive financial and technical failure.

Web Servers : Microsoft had high hopes to become the 'backbone of the internet'. They got trounced by Apache/LAMP.

Many - if not most - trainers are still clinging to the discredited theory of "Alpha dominance." That dogs assort themselves into dominance hierarchies, and that you must set yourself as "alpha." This theory was made famous by a researcher - Rudolph Schenkel - who studied wolves in captivity, not in the wild. He later discovered that canines assort themselves into simple family structures. He has recanted his claims, but it seems few people listen : http://www.whole-dog-journal.com/issues/14_12/features/Alpha-Dogs_20416-1.html

This professional shot seems to show a woman who is, like, fine and stuff. But not beautiful in the sense that would impact her interactions with the world ...

(Note - I posed the question, this answer is really just so I can provide a quick image ...)

Not exactly "reply all", but a startup I worked for on a hiring spree, and lined up about 100 people to come in and interview.

The email invitation was blasted out to the entire list of recipients, all of whom were listed together in the To: line. Thus blowing confidentially right out the window.

This is an ambitious project. I would get some expert help.

Sudeshna Sarkar from IIT Kharagpur has written an excellent paper on text pattern-matching across languages, http://sites.computer.org/debull/A07mar/sarkar.pdf.

I suggest you email ... oh. Right.

I guess you're on your own.

"Why is that today - everything has involved something going in, or coming out of my ass!" -- Cartman Gets an Anal Probe

(I fit your criteria, but won't go into specifics because of my answer)

Forget about IQs.

The IQ test was invented as a broad diagnostic tool for kids who were doing poorly in class.
Some have learning disabilities, some have issues outside the classroom, and some were just bored.

That was all the test was meant for.

The ability to take IQ tests just doesn't translate well into real intellectual ability. A 165 isn't really smarter than a 135 in any important way.

Americans have uniquely seized upon this IQ thing, perhaps due to our obsession with metrics.

Case in point : Marilyn Vos Savant has one of the highest recorded IQs. She's never made any sort of intellectual contribution to humanity, and in fact has done some really stupid things. She wrote a book claiming that Andrew Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was invalid because it used Non Euclidean geometry. She objected that Non Euclidean Geometry wasn't "real".

It was embarassingly stupid.

Genius don't fill in multiple-choice questions trying to best each other.

They come up with much more interesting and productive things to do. Attack an unsolved mathematical conjecture. Write an exciting piece of software. Start blogging. Or think up something so new it doesn't have a name yet ...

Prepare yourself. We must retire to a quiet place and go back.
Way back.

Back before smartphones, before cellphones, before the world wide web.

It's 1993 and Whitney Houston's "I will always love you" is top of the charts. Nobody has heard of Quentin Tarantino.

The most fun a geek could have on his PC was dialing into a Bulletin Board and downloading a nude picture of Kathryn Janeway, Captain of the USS Voyager on Star Trek. For four hours.

Everything changed in December, 1993. A game was released for the PC called Doom. It was free to copy (the first levels). No protection at all.

It was the first "3D 1st-person shooter" : An immersive, 3-dimensional cartoon where you run around blowing up aliens. Doom's engineers had squeezed an amazing amount of graphic performance out of the limited hardware at the time - they leapfrogged other game develops and launched a new genre : a violent, interactive movie.

Within weeks everybody was playing it.

There were a variety of weapons to kill aliens (and your friends) with : shotguns, machine guns, grenades.

And then there was the BFG9000 (Big Fucking Gun 9000). It was no gun : it was a weapon of mass destruction. You didn't even have to aim it, just pull the trigger and it nuked everything in your field of view.

There was no defense, no shield, no amount of health that could stop the BFG9000 (still spoken of in hushed, reverent tones )

So it's 1993. An hour into your download, and you can see Captain Janeway's collar bone. Which doesn't matter because the connection will drop before it finishes, and the photo is fake anyway.

But you're holding the ultimate weapon in the ultimate computer game.

Alas, the engineers also put in 'cheat codes' - special sequences of characters that would let you possess the BFG9000 any time you wanted.

It was too much for any one person to handle. People went mad with power.

Pause and give thanks that cows don't fly.

Boom box. We used to listen to music together, outside.

Compass. There was a magic to being lost, before the GPS.

15's pretty old, depending on the person. It may be too late to influence her intellectual development, but maybe not.

I would show her how young programmers are changing the world. Show her The Social Network. Tell her about Rebekah Cox who was promoted rapidly to video game cashier and went on to do something or other with computers.

Invite her to Quora.

Edit : This was my 500th answer on Quora!

The last episode of South Park airs.

"Screw you guys, I'm going home!"

Like any young person crossing into adulthood, it's time to see the world and sort out your romantic life.

Go backpacking in eastern europe, Africa, India. You'll discover a mobile world out there. The next billion users will come online via mobile devices. The future is mobile.

Facebook doesn't really have an awesome mobile experience yet.

OK, you've spent some time to travel the world and evaluate your future. Now it's time to sort out your heart.

"Hey. Microsoft. Yea, um, we need to talk. I appreciate so much what you did when I was younger, the infusion of capital for such a small piece of equity. And I was happy to put a Bing Box right up there. But the world has changed, and let's be honest : Bing's not going to hit the big time. About 15% is all you're gonna get.

And it turns out nobody gives a crap about social search.

And don't get me wrong - your new phone is awesome. Awesome - and too late. People like two choices - coke and pepsi, democrat and republican, paper or plastic. They don't like three. You can come up with the best cola in the world for 5 cents a gallon and nobody cares. Too late.

I just ... need to see other people right now. Remember when you and Apple were dating, and you invested to save them from bankruptcy? Eventually ... Apple had to move on. And so do I."

"Hey. Google. No - don't hang up. I just want to talk.

I know the whole Bing thing hurt you. And we wouldn't let you crawl our data.

I understand about G+. I'd be angry too.

But that was a long time ago, GOOG, and I've been doing some thinking. Microsoft and I just aren't right for each other.

Modesty aside, I'm the biggest thing in social and you're the biggest thing in mobile. The world needs a mobile social net. I need you. You need me. The world needs us. It's destiny.

Maybe we can just hang out? White-board some stuff, no commitments.

People keep missing with location-based social, maybe we can sketch something out that people like? Something, anything.

Talk to me, GOOG."

To illustrate Joshua Engel's point, consider a slinky versus a broomstick.

You and I hold the ends of a slinky. You slap one end. The wave moves toward me so slowly you can watch it.

Now a broomstick. I feel it almost instantly.

The slinky is compressible.

This also explains another interesting phenomena about water and sound : a hand grenade going off near a ship under water can blow a hole through the steel hull. As with the broomstick, the knock is not just faster but much harder. This is the theory behind depth charges, which sink submarines just by exploding near them.

I dream of a day when a chicken can cross the road without its motives being called into question. -- Unknown

My reality check bounced. -- Unknown

When you walk a mile in another man's shoes - you're a mile away from him and you've got his shoes! -- Steven Wright

You can't have everything. Where would you put it? -- Steven Wright

A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths. -- Steven Wright

Yo. Open your eyes, man.

Humpty Dumpty was pushed!

I'm going to get my ass kicked for this, but here goes :

Germany and Japan.

Both of these nations have formally apologized.

Not a word of regret has ever been uttered by the victors for the deliberate targeting of civil populations.

Honor can't exist in the denial of wrong-doing.

Get thee hence to Five Guys.

Byron's lament of lost love, When We Two Parted :

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow--
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me--
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well--
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met--
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?--
With silence and tears.

So. Um. You'll excuse me, there's something in my eye ...

During the U.S. Civil War, almost all of our military might had been expended, agriculture and transportation of goods was severely disrupted, a great many southern cities were lain to waste.

I don't think it would have been hard to plant things like Sarin gas, which doesn't require a lot of infrastructure to make.

I've asked myself the same question. The best I can come up with is : This was Cheney's war - he was the architect of both the WMD story and the 'swarm' military tactics used to topple the Hussein regime.

I don't think Cheney and his band of neocons really cared if the story shook out.
Bush '44 would take the fall for that - they set him up. The oil fields in Iraq were secured and billions went to contractors like Haliburton.

Mission Accomplished.

An illusion of hope.

Don't fight the bike.

Adrift. Neither stationary nor headed anywhere.

In addition to Russell Canty's great answer, subs can get information on expected friendly positions by phoning home via communication channels such as ELF and VLF - low frequency radio which is listen-only.

Subs can pass info back home using underwater acoustical 'telephones' or by surfacing briefly to use conventional radio.

Humans have scanned the skies with radio telescopes for decades.

We have seen no trace of intelligent life.

All empirical evidence points to this : We are totally alone in the cosmos.

California in general has a more laid-back culture than, say, New England. People are more civil, less aggressive.

Mistake this for weakness at your peril.

It's hard to hide anything in a town this small, but it happens!

Red's Sandwich Shop is not to be missed, http://www.redssandwichshop.com/
For 8 bucks you get an amazing meal (not a sandwich). They are so busy with locals they don't appear to want more business. You can walk right by the place and not realize there's even a restaurant there. But look it up and walk in.

Are you short on cash? It's OK, lots of people are. The Howling Wolf sells enormous burritos for 7 or 8 bucks. It's too much food for one person. Split it with a friend - a hearty meal for 3.50.

I'll be back to add items to this as they occur to me ...

I don't think most Americans care.

There is a general sense that this was a "kill mission", there was never any intention to capture Bin Laden. Thinking of George W Bush's remark, "Wanted : Dead or Alive."

He was to be shot dead on sight. I expect most Americans agree with this objective, and shrug off the (possible) cover story that Bin Laden was armed and firing with a wink.

Immunity.

For N answers, you can't be downvoted, collapsed, or marked.

Because the last time the global economy was this unstable, World War II broke out.

The banking system itself, whole industries and indeed nations - had to be rescued from bankruptcy.

They borrowed a ton of money and loaned it to homeowners who couldn't repay.

Technically, they bought the loans - didn't loan it directly - but same result.

This was Cheney's war. Cheney and his band of neocons had long planned to topple Hussein and establish a western style democracy. This was part of a grander scheme to westernize the Middle East in order to secure the oil supply over the next fifty years. The greatest threat to the western, industrialized world is a dwindling oil supply in the hands of hostile governments, the reasoning goes.

Cheney created a white house culture where questioning the existence of Iraqi WMD's or terrorist ties was viewed as obstructionist trouble-making and would get you fired.

Bush and Blair were duped.

Mission Accomplished.

"When you're going through hell, keep going." -- Winston Churchill

If you live in a city, get a motor scooter. A 50cc motor scooter is a great way to get around in a city. In most cities, you don't have to park it in a legal spot, but can chain it up anywhere like a bicycle. It also blazes through traffic jams and pays for itself in gas savings.

Avoid energy vampires. Negative people, over-talkative people sap your sense of well-being. They don't appreciate your time anyway because they don't appreciate much of anything.

Don't drink too much. The metabolites of alcohol can linger in your body for days.

Lose the urge to impress people with your wit, wealth, power. This is a natural tendency; it's important to grow out of it. Kindness is what makes people like you.

Practice random acts of kindness. Buy that homeless person a coffee and breakfast sandwich. Sit and listen to a street musician for ten minutes. Write a special note of thanks on your napkin for the waitress.

Don't sweat the 5th decimal place. If you make, say, 70K/year - focus on the savings that really matter. That $90 dinner out is easily skipped. Forget saving 2 bucks on a movie ticket, 75 cents on a tank of gas, 5 bucks on a pair of shoes. "But I'll save $500 a year if ....". A year? That's less than 1% of your income.

Let go of any and all grudges. Today. Send them an email and tell them it's water under the bridge and you hope they are well.

It appears that the transition to carnivore was a critical evolutionary step, coincident with the taming of fire (humans cannot chew or digest raw meat well enough to survive on it). Lacking any natural ability to hunt and kill, we ex-herbivores were forced to develop weapons and language to compensate. This brought the evolutionary pressure towards greater intelligence to new levels.

It would be a bleak, colorless, dystopian nightmare. The hapless inhabitants would founder, zombie-like, haunted by a dim awareness that an unseen force had murdered passion itself, left it bleeding out on the highway, dying beneath the merciless sun of Accuracy.

It may be more effective to mail it to your senator :)

Some suggestions :

Buy earplugs. (Not to be snarky, but how did this solution escape your notice given your phrase "destroying my life" ? Again, constructively : I sense a hint of histrionics on your part which can sometimes cause people to ignore you.)

Suggest your room-mate get his/her hearing tested. Hearing impairments can make people loud.

Dishes and doors are causing all this noise? Is it possible you are just an early-to-bed type who is easily woken by noise, and your room mate is a night owl? If so, there may be no right or wrong here, you may just be incompatible roomies.

The Gulu Gulu Cafe has board games and lots of big picnic tables. It's funky, loud and inviting.

Oneil's is a bar/pub with lots of personalities. When Irish music is playing, lots of families bring their kids who dance around to the fiddles. (check their schedule - http://oneillsofsalem.com/events.html

Mediocrity abounds, by definition.

To whiskey. Hope is lost.

Maybe Quoran's ... just not that into you.

Chill, brah.

Make a commitment to other people to show/deliver by a certain date.

This creates the social pressure to do things necessary to ship : late nights working, cut corners, make compromises, stop and say "good enough".

This also can help reinvigorate you; anything you make tends to look "meh" by the time you're finishing (version 1.0 at least). Accolades from fresh eyes can reconnect you with your original passion over the idea.

Steal their job and do it better.

I will answer this just as soon as I put you into my unnecessarily complex death machine which doesn't work.

Mwuahahahahahahah ....

The movie which motivated this question was one I just saw,

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

This is one of those rare movies that surpasses good, hops over great, landing squarely in the immortal ground of Important.

RT : 52%/62%

Edit : the movie also contains one of the biggest gaffs ever to make it past the cutting room : Two people set out to cross the Atlantic on a single engine Cessna, which would run out of fuel and splash down before they got even half way.

40, um, something here and never married.

As for the longer lifespan of married men, there's a huge problem here with correlation versus causation. It's pretty clear that both longevity and tendency-to-marry would be negatively affected by some common causes :

Criminal behavior

Poverty/homelessness

Addictions

Compulsive sexual promiscuity

Antisocial behavior : quick to argue or fight. Being a jerk in general.

It's nearly impossible to normalize for these underlying causes. Given this, it's not at all clear that marrying adds a single day to a man's life (while addressing these underlying causes certainly will.) That would be like trying to make it rain by carrying an umbrella.

Anyway, life for me is pretty happy. I've got a great new girlfriend. Given a couple of decades of relationships which ranged from good to disastrous, I feel I was able to choose someone more suited to me and vice versa.

I am free to go out almost all the time, which I do. I work in cafe's, I have a huge tribe of artist/musician/technical friends.

That it exists.

The question asks for speculation, so I shall do so without shame :

Jefferson would claim the current government has violated its mandate to uphold the constitution and personal liberty. He would advocate revolution.

Particularly, Jefferson would point out the erosion of Habeas Corpus under the National Defense Authorization Act and the violation of the War Powers Clause by subsequent War Powers Acts.

He would say something like, "The citizenry are subject to arrest without due process; the world is subject to attack without consent of Congress. We put forth our very lives to secure your liberty; they have since been squandered in the face of threats far less menacing than the British gallows from which we'd have most certainly been hanged ..."

Drink.
Blow shit up.
Barbeque.
Nod respectfully to veterans who often don uniforms.

In the evening, continue all of the above en mass at a fireworks show.

It worked for CERN.

Let's collide and try to see God.

Their goals and function are incomparable.

Facebook wants page-views. it attracts them by serving social chatter in mostly short form. quality of content doesn't matter ... its interesting because it came from your friends.

Quora, on the other hand, wants good content without regard to social relevance.

Quora could kill Wikipedia, not Facebook.

when it comes time to land, get everyone back on earth to wear ape suits.

American suburbs. they seem to me ... A barren wasteland with perfectly manicured lawns.

there is no coffee shop to walk into. no lawn where musicians play. no art. no culture, no anything.

The suburbs seem designed only to drive out of.

The "Alpha" pack theory of wolves and dogs. That dog owners must win the struggle for "alpha dominance". The researcher who coined this terminology recanted the whole theory, to no avail.

"Women earn 70 cents on the dollar for the same work." In the USA, it's 98 cents. A free market would never let such a disparity exist.

"Paper destroys trees." Trees for paper production are planted and harvested for that purpose.

Hope.

How confusing, uncertain, and scary it is to deal with people while you don't yet have mastery over their language. Especially when they are impatient.

Something to keep in mind the next time an immigrant behind the counter gives you that "dumb" look and "just can't get it right" and you want to yell at them.

Maybe they screwed up your sandwich. Is that all it takes to make you cruel?

Yes, but it goes in first and comes out last.

Put it off till the day after.

It's life that needs your attention.

Total bunk.

The dying.

Competition.. Virtually every idea is being pursued by different start ups, in different ways. Think Facebook, Groupon, Foursquare, Quora.

Each emerged from a field of competitors.

It's meant to be, IMO.

Quora is where you come when you can't find a satisfactory answer on Google.

For better or worse, Google is a metric-driven company. All decisions, from hiring to launching, are expected to have a quantifiable justification.

I think engineering experience is a necessary, but not sufficient skill for a CEO of a tech company.

A few thoughts as to why :

Simplicity. Because engineers have to grind out the code, they are ruthless about cutting features. They say No alot. Non technical people invariably want to add their favorite pet feature. This crap accrues until the interface is a mess and the code base unmanageable (I'm looking at you, MySpace-2006. ) When coders rule you get the elegant simplicity of, say, Google's simple box on a plain white page.

Reading tea-leaves. Technical people have an intimate sense of what's coming : "cheap disk storage is going to make photo sharing basically free, BUT we've got to scale the fuck out of those servers ..." "Let's build this like it's a public API, even though it's private. I want to be able to open this to the public with the push of a button."

Habitual, personal commitment to quality. As someone who builds stuff themselves, they are used to showing it to friends. It is a source of pride. For many coders, this is actually a greater motivation than money. This leads to decisions like, "Popup ads? Not on my watch. I'd rather bankrupt the company."

Not in it for the money. Alluded to above, they tend not to sell out, dilute themselves out of existence, or panic about money. They focus on "relentlessly awesome execution" (to steal a phrase someone used to describe facebook.) In the end, if your product is head-and-shoulders above others in awesomeness, you're probably going to win. No matter how many deals you passed up.

Zero tolerance for bullshit. Software is a world of objective reality. A no-spin zone. Vacuous business-speak and other meaningless activity tends to get stepped on.

Nobody ever be bought a cookie, only to watch it explode when they picked it up.

Unplug from your regular job. No work during your break, no emails, no phone calls. This time is yours.

Don't party. Alcohol, etc, may be fun at the time but just fuels the funk.

Get some exercise. This lifts energy, mood and creativity I find. It sounds like the place you're going is ideal for hikes in the country side.

Engage your creativity : Whatever your thing is, writing, art, product design ... Take a fresh stab at it.

A computer of your very own. It's hard to describe how much this affected geeks on a personal level. There wasn't much you could actually do with them; but there was a strong intuitive sense that something very big was happening.

MTV. At first, it was all about the music.

The walkman. Think of it as an ipod that holds 12 songs on audio tape.

"Blitzkrieg" Boris Becker. This young tennis star stunned the world (and the tennis masters) with his speed and his willingness to land on his face. More than once he walked off the court bloodied - and victorious.

Video arcades. A perfect example of the "Wealth of Paucity" - it was only possible to play these games at an arcade. You had to get out of the house to play.

The Brat Pack. I know, I know. But it was cool having this young group of actors who worked so well together, it was a big part of the zeitgeist.

Real beer. Home-brewing was legalized in 1978, this led to an explosion in craft brews.

Skin-tight Calvin Klein jeans. Imagine being a straight male trying to get through your teens surrounded by girls in these. (Brooke Shields gets honorable mention too.)

College rock : The subversive seed of "Alternative Rock", college radio stations began breaking new bands that couldn't get on mainstream radio. REM and others broke out this way.

The Smiths :

The Cure :

The Compact Disc (which was often called 'laser disc', at first.) No. Distortion. At. All.

Amusingly, FM stations would brag that they are playing a song "on laser disc".
Which was kind of silly given that FM can't transmit anywhere near the fidelity of a CD. But once you got one home and tried it - it was an OMG experience.

The hopeless American olympic hockey team beats the powerhouse Soviet team in the "Miracle on Ice." The cold war was very much on in those days - this was a big deal.

Back to the Future. Think of it as "The best mindless blockbuster ever made."
97% on RT. Some critic reviews :
"Probably the most carefully-scripted blockbuster in Hollywood history."
"Delightful and sophisticated to a degree beyond the dreams of today's movies in similar vein."
"Back to the Future is one of the best popcorn movies ever made. It's ingenuity, time-traveling twist ups and wonderfully vibrant characters resonate in ways few films ever achieve."

There is a documentary which was shown at some film festivals : http://worldsfirsttemple.com/

I don't think the mayor possesses any legal authority to keep a lawful business out.

But it can be done - especially in Boston. It's still a very provincial city, a lot of things happen over a handshake, a wink, and sometimes a bribe.

Menino can make a lot of things go wrong for Chick Fil-A. Inspectors can become impossible to please, license applications can get lost, delayed and denied. Protestors can be summoned with a phone call.

Unfair? You betcha. But that's how it is.

Antacid : Just use some baking soda or eat a banana.

Mosquito Repellant : Rub a dryer sheet on your clothes and skin.

"After-bite" treatment for mosquito bites : This stuff is just ammonia. Some ammonia-based window cleaner works as well. Or - apply a dab of tooth-paste. The menthol in toothpaste also acts to relieve the itch.

As a student in college, I worked in the cafeteria. It was a typical prepaid meal-plan, no cash register - the kids came in and took whatever they want.

I was restocking the jello and a cafeteria worker said, "Put the lemon jello out. Nobody likes it. We won't have to restock it as often."

That's what's wrong with communism. Lemon Jello.

In my experience, VC's aren't interested in small seed-sized investments. They've got too much money to manage and it's just too much work keeping track of a thousand little startups.

You can put together a video pitch (make it good!) and research active Angels in the valley. Sometimes, it's best not to ask for money but simply advice. Everyone loves to give the latter :)

Also give Y Combinator a look ...

The Great Recession : The sub-prime mortgage crisis, the rise of derivatives/mortgage-backed securities, destabilization of the global financial system.

The flooding of New Orleans : The greatest nation on earth couldn't evacuate a city.

The invasion of Iraq failing to turn up any WMD's.

"Reality TV" - which was pretty good when it was based in reality (The Deadliest Catch") but took an unreal turn into contrived, bizarre live-in game shows.

Make a Voltaic Pile (battery), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaic_pile.
You need pennies, nickles, paper towels and salt water. Arrange the coins as shown in the picture, with a brine-soaked paper towel between each coin-gap.
Using two wires at top and bottom, and touching them to your tongue, you can feel the current. Make one big enough (or connect up a few together), and you can light up a bulb.

Oh - and buy a telescope.

I had never seen 50 police cars in one place before.

It was 1980 in my small home town of Norwich, CT. I was about to get the best civics lesson of my life.

The Ku Klux Klan was losing membership down south, and decided to come up north to do some recruitment. They wanted to hold a rally at a baseball field in Mohegan Park.

There was a legal scuffle, but ultimately the KKK's right to peaceably assemble and demonstrate was upheld.

So they came.

The baseball field was a 10 minute walk through the woods from my house. My father ordered me to stay away. I disobeyed and went anyway.

The local paper sat on our table. The front page that day said only this - in big bold type - and nothing else :

Unwanted. Uninvited. Scum.

I left the house, faked heading toward town, then changed direction toward the rally.

Half-way there I ran into two African-American kids (we just said 'black' back then), about my age. I said, "Are you going to the rally?" They just said, "Yeah." And there was this deadly pause. I wanted to say something like what the newspaper said. I didn't know how to. I guess I felt ashamed.

I came over the hill and saw the police cars neatly parked in an array. I counted fifty exactly.

There was a wall of police - about 200 of them - in full riot gear : shields, helmets, batons. They formed an unbreachable barricade.

There were about 400 angry protestors yelling and chanting. Occasionally an object would get tossed over the police barricade, but nothing hit its mark.

In the middle of all this - six KKK guys. They were saying something through a bullhorn but you couldn't hear them over the crowd. They did not have their hoods on.

They were surrounded and appeared scared shitless.

15 minutes into their 'rally', they gave up. Police warned the crowd not to interfere with their departure or follow them. Nobody did.

As they threw in the towel, there were cheers and chants of "And stay the fuck out!"

And stay the fuck out they did. We never heard from them again.

I said this was a big civics lesson for me. I learned :

The right to free expression must be granted to everyone - even those we find despicable - otherwise it is not a right at all. The KKK was allowed to rally in order to preserve the rights of everyone.

The rebuke of the community is stronger than the politician's pen. City officials may have succeeded in preventing the KKK from coming. But only the community - that scene i witnessed in the baseball park - could make them not want to come.

The skies do not fall when we defend the right of expression for bigots. Democracy is messy, offensive and noisy.

We musn't try to silence hatred, rather we must answer it.

I haven't come across a single one of them recanting.

Which is strange. MIT had been bouncing laser beams off mirrors installed on the moon by Apollo 11 for decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

If the moon landings were a hoax, the Soviets would have bounced their own beam up there and exposed it.

In game theory, the The Prisoner's Dilemma where two or more people must irrationality cooperate to get the best personal outcome.

If that sounds impossible - you're sane. The Prisoner's Dilemma is counter-intuitive as hell.

This could be an artifact of the legislative process; people naturally prefer multiples of ten. It's easy to imagine one group who wants the speed limit to be n*10, another wants (n+1)*10, and they settle on the compromise (n+1/2)*10 .

The ghastly English system of measures - abandoned by England - but still in use here in the United States.

I was not struck directly, but for that reason my account here might be of some interest. Since I was not stunned, I had a chance to observe perhaps better than someone directly zorched.

I was asleep at my house when I was 15. Lightening struck just outside my bedroom window. It took me a while to figure out that was what happened.

What I experienced was this : A booming, screaming jumbo jet burst out of the ground and retreated into the sky. I could distinctly hear it retreat. My first thought was, inexplicably, a jet aircraft had done just that.

I had to think about the physics of that - it makes perfect sense. The lightening bolt appears from sky to ground nearly instantaneously. So the sound from the nearest point - here on the ground - comes first and loudest.

Then new sound comes from further up the bolt, less intense and a bit later. And so it goes all the way up to the clouds.

The effect is this auditory illusion - exactly like an explosion ascending into the sky.

(I have some slight hearing loss, probably as a result of this incident. Every outlet in the room ejected its plug, but i don't think there was any other damage. I guess the lightening followed the grounding wires/pipes into the ground.)

I think you're getting tangled up in terminology.

Algorithms are everywhere, they are the heart of programming. There are no rules of thumb as to "How do I pick which one?" etc.

Forget the word algorithms for now, altogether. Learn to program and all will be become clear.

This graph. It certainly appears that the earth is warming right on schedule, as it has always done, long before humans burned hydrocarbons.

The villain is a "looter", in Rand's parlance. He literally "hangs the rich". He's like Wesley Mouch on steroids.

What Patrick Reilly said, Fourier Analysis is cool because it gives you a musical synthesizer!

There's even an app for that : http://moogmusic.com/products/apps/animoog-iphone/

Woodstock.

Woodstock heralded a dramatic new social dynamic in the United States : the emergence of the "Generation Gap."

In the 1940's and before, there really wasn't this notion of "generation". Kids dressed as their parents did, listened to the same music, held pretty much the same values. Corporations didn't generally target them as a separate demographic.

The first cracks between the generations began in the post-war 50's with the beatniks and Elvis. Kids were dressing different and listening to different music.

This generation "crack" collided with a senseless land war in South East Asia, with a nuclear arms race threatening to destroy humanity, with the Pill ... with a dozen things.

The crack became a chasm as a new generation flatly rejected the values of their elders. They openly called for the overthrow of their government. "Never trust anyone over 30" was their battle cry. Authority figures from the President to the local cop were simply called "Pigs".

In a freakish and unpredictable act of "generational identification", 500,000 of them showed up for a music festival in an obscure town in New York.

Another million tried to go but ended up stuck in traffic.

Unrecognizable to their elders in both appearance and beliefs, in a sense this was the first new and distinct American generation. They came to Woodstock to announce and celebrate themselves.

We've been naming each new generation ever since.

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, "tell me, where are you going?"
This he told me :
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
got to get back to the land

And set my soul free.

...

By the time we got to Woodstock,
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration.

And I dreamed I saw the bomber-death-planes
Riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation.

We are stardust.
Billion year old carbon.
We are golden..
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

--Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

In his book Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung argues that art exists to express emotions that language cannot capture.

He says, "We know more than we can tell."

The instructions given to soldiers were, according to my fuzzy recollection : shield your body and your eyes during the flash (duck into your trench). This protected against the initial blast of blinding light and ionizing radiation.

Then - assuming you are a safe distance from the heat, about which little can be done - brace for the blast. In an urban environment the biggest threat is flying glass. This is where "duck and cover" helps. You don't want to be bleeding from 1000 cuts in a town without bandages or antiobiotics. On the battlefield ... just stay in your trench.

Cover your nose and mouth with wet cloth. A surgical mask is even better. This prevents you from inhaling any radioactive dust.

At this point, again according to my unsubstantiated and fuzzy recollection - you're pretty safe. Most of the radiation in the environment is stopped by a layer of cloth, so bundle up. Don't inhale unfiltered air and don't eat or drink anything.

And get the fuck out :) I imagine an offroad motorcycle is your best bet; remember to bring couple cans of fix-o-flat as you're likely to puncture a tire on some debris.

Leave now because not only is fallout on its way, but a firestorm is also spreading .

When you get to where you're headed, immediately shed all your clothes and shower. Goggles for your eyes and a clothespin for your nose might help keep radioactive water from being ingested.

A few things :

They accidentally found a better ranking algorithm.

Originally they set out to search academic papers. In academe, the quality of a paper is often adjudged by the number of times it has been cited in other papers.

In web parlance, by the number of link-backs. At the time, a typical search engine worked by counting occurrences of search words.

The latter was especially gameable: just dump all sorts of common search terms into your document. Which spammers did. Man, did they.

Link-backs are harder to create, and a good measure of quality. At a time when spam was flooding search results, Google was able to keep it relevant.

Nobody would buy them.

They tried to sell their search engine for a million bucks. No takers. (Retroactive face-palm all around.)

They realized that search would "monetize" the web, and built an awesome platform for advertisers (AdSense.)

They stayed the course and didn't get greedy. Imagine what a square inch of white-space on that landing page could sell for! (Looking at you, yahoo.)
They didn't succumb to that temptation, and kept paid search results distinct and unobtrusive.

What Dan Holliday said. It's the same for straight guys like me.

There is an almost unbearable intensity, especially the first time. You feel elated, connected, alive, scared ... You can think of nothing else. Their slightest touch is like a thunderbolt. Minutes feel like months.

Know this : these feelings aren't coming from them, they are coming from inside you. They are internal. They'll come again. You're feeling your own capacity for love.

The important thing is to shield the other person from the intensity and urgency of your feelings. Fake being chill. It's not easy.

Welcome to the game.

Don't worry about getting fast in multiple languages. But do : pick a 'home' language and learn it *cold*. Use it so much your fingers handle the syntax for you, your eyes are automatic bug-catchers. C++ is still a choice, but java or python get much respect, and really any widely used language will do.

Also learn about the different *types* of languages. Imperative, declarative, functional. Compiled, interpreted. Frameworks like ROR. Client-centric, server-centric.

Shaken, not pressed.

When a text notification comes up i'd like to be able to read it by flicking my phone to the left.

Then I'd like to able to answer
by voice.

Fuck no.

Those terms are hyperbolic, overused, and culture-deaf.

Devs dont talk that way. They never did. It's the manic babble of advertisers, recruiters and mainstream media.

In earlier times, the term "whiz" would have been applied to Edison or Einstein. (it was.)

Sock puppet.

Their absence in time, space and email.

Real Time Yelp.

How is the band tonight? How long is the wait for a table? What menu items are out of stock?

Anything at 350 degrees or higher.

They eat things ... before they are cool.

Detach horse.

Reposition horse in front of cart.

Re-attach horse.

Not filling out your profile because there are no followers is like taking your guitar to a park bench and refusing to play because nobody is listening yet.

That thing's solar powered, right? There are probably some serious energy constraints as well.

Edit : No, it isn't solar powered. It's powered by Plutonium. Thanks to Matthew Baldwin and Andy McFarland.

It's old as dirt but never loses its punch :

"Hey! I'm working here! Do I show up at your job and screw with the french fry machine ???"

Ubuntu generally works out of the box. It's worth getting past any glitches you may be having, because the LAMP/ROR support is awesome.

And the community is always helpful.

Inbox me and I'd be happy to try and sort things out.

Also, you might like to develop in the cloud on a platform like Linode.

The Bomb.

The Cold War.

Inertia.

The creation of nuclear weapons in 1945 by the US (and 1949 by the Soviets) created a situation where there would not be time to get a formal declaration of war. A nuclear war would be over before Congress could even convene - just a few hours.

To deal with this, the Office of the President interpreted the phrase in the constitution "commander in chief of the armed forces" to mean the President could deploy the military without a declaration of war.

So both the President and the Soviet Premier had their finger on the button with no intervening parliamentary consent required.

Now the two nuclear super-powers were at a standoff, and The Cold War was well underway. The two sides then engaged in a series of covert and proxy wars.

Basically, the argument was made that the US president must be at parity with the Soviet Premiere. S/he must be able to react just as quickly and just as sneakily.

So Korea and Vietnam were "police actions", and the bombing of Laos was conducted entirely in secret.

After the miserable experience of the Vietnam War, congress attempted to reign in the power of the President via the War Powers Act of 1973. This prevented the President from secretly deploying troops and imposed a 60 day time limit on military actions conducted without congressional approval. (This was quite a constitutional showdown; Congress over-rode a presidential veto of the act.)

Forgive me some editorializing; during the cold war all of this perhaps made sense. And certainly we have to give the president authority to launch nukes in relation for a nuclear strike.

But now that the cold war is over and well, there is an old scrap of paper in a dumpster somewhere in DC which says,

"Congress shall have the power to declare war."

Which seems pretty…unambiguous to me anyway.

The Caps Lock key exists now only to mess up passwords.

The wifi-off key on laptops exists now just to knock us offline.

Our educational system was designed to produce an intellectually passive, docile, minimally literate factory worker.

Jailbreak that puppy, and install the TetherMe app from Cydia.

Never worked there, but i'll give it a shot :

Yes but not literally. I'm sure there are committees in Apple doing ... something.

But not designing product. What Jobs meant is Apple does not design by consensus. (Or by market research, or by metrics, or user feedback.) They design according to the aesthetics of a single person.

One guy's hunch.

That it works so astonishingly well is a lesson nobody else seems ready or able to absorb.

It's about origins. Unlike the Jamestown settlement, who came here to get rich (and starved in the process), the Puritans were the first Europeans who came here to settle permanently.

In a sense they were the first Americans. 25% of the modern population of the US is descended from Puritans aboard the Mayflower.

Yea, strictly on the libertarian principle that people should be able to do what they want so long as it doesn't hurt others.

And I mean direct harm; not the "Oh! But you're damaging the values of society and subverting our culture ... " which can apply to anything at all.

Let em do their thing, shack up in Geodome, whatever. What do we care? The number of folks who actually want to do this sort of thing is a very small percentage of the population anyway, I believe.

Another possibility :

At home there are likely to be people who would inhibit their drug use : family, friends, even permanent staff.

Bicycles are safer; they are lighter (much), more maneuverable, and have lower average speed, higher clearance and limited range.

However, the question is a bit like asking which is safer : rafts or crabbing boats. Rafts, of course, because you really can't
take them far.

See owner's manual for battery removal. Sears and Walmart carry motorcycle chargers for 30ish bucks. Follow directions on charger.

DO NOT USE A CAR BATTERY CHARGER, YOUR BATTERY WILL EXPLODE.

Also, if you can kick start/ pop start/ push the scoot (or take the batt out), many motorcycle shops will charge it for a small fee.

But do buy a charger, many a battery has gone dead and needed replacing after an idle winter.

This could also be due to water in your air box, from either a crack in the box or heavy rain. You can remove the foam and dry it out.

Or it could be the fuel-air mix. It's the first google hit so I won't give that info here.

They're cool, well built, not the best value though. Better overall performance and durability come from Japan and taiwan (kymco)

Just my thing, vespa fans, reasonable people will differ.

As others have said, lines-of-code isn't just a bad metric, it is a non metric.

Bill Gates said, "measuring lines of code is like judging the quality of an aircraft by weighing it."

Show me not what how many lines you wrote, but how many lines you saved (or what functionality you added.)

Don't count lines. Don't count lines. Don't count lines.

And if you ever get a chance, mention this to the big tech firms, almost all of which measure engineer performance by lines checked in.

PS : you say you're just learning python. Put down the stopwatch and let the mojo of python fill you. If you whip through a language u can lose the big picture.

The fastest coders are usually not the best.

Education is actually a big part of the problem.

One of the essential roles of education is political indoctrination to produce soldiers. Students are taught that they were born under the best flag ever, that their nation's values are the only good and right thing. They are presented with mythologized heroes who lived and usually died for the sake of country.

It's true everywhere, from a grammar school in Kentucky to a madras in afghanistan.

I was a young student when I was taught about US "Manifest Destiny" - our God-given mandate to seize all the land from coast to coast, driving native populations to extinction. I said, "that's exactly what the Nazi's said. They called it lieberstrom". I was thrown out of class and almost suspended.

Oppressive regimes have been especially adept at leveraging education as their most basic propaganda tool.

An interesting question is : how can education be changed so that war is less like in future generations?

"You stay out of our kitchen, we stay out of your bedroom. "